Maribel Casas-Cortes

• PhD 2009 at UNC-Chapel Hill
• Professor at University of Zaragoza

The term precarity has been circulating Europe since the late 1980s and is currently used by social movements to contentiously challenge classical notions of production, reproduction, and citizenship. This paper follows the development of the term among several activist networks in Europe (mainly in Spain) through their engagements with crises of t...

Practices of subleasing and borrowing delivery app accounts are spreading among platform-based food couriers in Spain. This article engages the significance of these seemingly neglectable practices among couriers in deportable situations. Both celebratory and critical portraits of the platform revolution have tended to ignore the question of migrat...

The politics of time, and particularly practices of waiting, spring in the narratives of any border crossing. This article draws from the scholarly analysis on migratory temporalities, to shed light upon the temporalities of urban delivery platforms, strongholds of migrant labor. We focus on waiting both as a research object and analytical lens to...

This paper argues for reengaging the work on the primordial role of mobility advanced by Yann Moulier-Boutang, especially in his seminal book De l’esclavage au salariat: Economie historique du salariat bride (1998). His re-centering of historicity highlights the transformative potential of human mobility in broader social processes, resonating with...

Platforms have become a central concern in scholarly production due to their sudden scope and rising popularity in mainstream discourse, which either hyper-celebrate their possible achievements, or over-dramatize underlying consequences. Together with related terms—such as sharing economy, digital ecosystems, algorithmic decision-making—the so-call...

These interventions reflect critically on current approaches to externalisation and identify new avenues for research. While recognising the importance of paying continued attention to practices associated with externalisation, they point out some of the limits that may derive from an uncritical focus on the issue, as well as some aspects that rema...

We invited Maribel and Alessandro, each of whom contributed an individual chapter to this volume, to engage in a written dialogue with us and with each other after reading each other’s chapter. Both of them made valuable contributions to the debates around care, emotions, social exclusion and citizenship as well as how these concepts relate to soci...

Almost twenty years ago, feminist activists based in Spain searched for a way to move beyond labour-centred critiques of precarity. In the process, they coined the term ‘caretizenship’. By centering care as the articulator of belonging, these activists proposed a way to develop intersectional politics outside the exclusionary and racialised institu...

El 14 de marzo de 2020, ante la crisis sanitaria ocasionada por la COVID-19, el Gobierno español declaró el estado de alarma en el conjunto del Estado, lo que, en diferentes fases y grados, supuso el confinamiento de la población y la suspensión de la actividad económica no considerada esencial. Esta decisión ha sido analizada desde múltiples persp...

Short Abstract: In this panel, we aim to expand and nuance conventional meanings of precarity, pointing towards the condition and ethics of the gig economy transformation. Which are the transformations of subjectivities, politics or tactics of resistance and 'commoning' of mobile precarity in late capitalism? Long Abstract: In recent years, the...

Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how t...

Scholarly debates over precarity are gaining unprecedented visibility across fields. From labor insecurity forming a growing dangerous class to the existential condition of vulnerability induced by millennial capitalism, precarity has become an object of both empirical study and theoretical reflection. While European social movements have been orga...

El enfoque que proponemos consiste en considerar la pandemia como un "hecho social total", en términos maussianos. Y es que el coronavi-rus es un fenómeno que pone en juego la totalidad de las dimensiones de lo social. Por tanto, este texto tiene como objetivo exponer, de forma clara y precisa, los efectos de la pandemia en diferentes áreas de la v...

Entre las tácticas de resistencia y creatividad desarrolladas por los movimientos sociales, el arte ha destacado por tener la habilidad de provocar la inestabilidad de los órdenes instituidos y cuestionar los supuestos mecanismos inclusivos. Las tácticas artísticas han sido la punta de lanza de multitud de movimientos sociales. En esta ocasión, pon...

Las migraciones y los controles migratorios se han convertido en objeto de máximo interés académico, institucional y mediático. Además de los enfoques convencionales sobre la movilidad humana y su gestión, han surgido interpretaciones alternativas con repercusiones epistemológicas, metodológicas y políticas. Este artículo se centra en la emergencia...

We are familiar with expressions such as “a war on drugs” and “a war on terror,” but what about “a war on mobility”? Is anyone speaking about the realities of our world in this way? It is time to popularize a radical twist in the discourse and perception of international migration and the ways it is currently dealt with. This essay builds on the id...

This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of conflicting maps. On the one hand, there are official cartographies produced by and circulating among policy makers, border authorities, security think tanks and media outlets. While these institutional maps deploy the professionalism and neutrality associ...

This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of conflicting maps. On the one hand, there are official cartographies produced by and circulating among policy makers, border authorities, security think tanks and media outlets. While these institutional maps deploy the professionalism and neutrality associ...

A series of activist efforts across Europe have been organizing under the umbrella concept of precarity, with a long trajectory of movements facing flexibilization policies, austerity programs and migratory restrictions. The rise of precarity activism in Spain has worked at the intersections of increasing vulnerability and mobility producing a prol...

This chapter focuses on the ways in which assumptions about who “migrants” and “expats” are and how long an individual or a community needs to remain “migrant” are shaped by a series of important institutions and technical practices. The chapter focuses on the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), created in 1993 to coordin...

This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico...

The generative power of mapping speaks to the material effects produced by maps and their capacity to order particular social and spatial relations. By focusing on the role that maps and mapping practices play within the politics of migration - the contentious field of actions and relations which determines who can move and in what condition -, we...

The intervention of European Union border authorities in countries of Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe has shown how the European state “border” has been displaced from its national moorings and externalized across the territories of neighboring states. Our research examines the outsourcing of the southern European Union border, focusing on the case...

Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, Fortress Europe continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non-EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to...

In recent years border externalization has emerged as a central policy framework for European Union (EU) border and migration management. New multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements on border management have been forged between the EU, its member states, and its North African neighbours and neighbours-of-neighbours. In the process, what is meant by...

The term precarity has been circulating Europe since the late 1980s and is currently used by social movements to contentiously challenge classical notions of production, reproduction, and citizenship. This paper follows the development of the term among several activist networks in Europe (mainly in Spain) through their engagements with crises of t...

The opposition between “the public” and “the private” is often seen as exhausting the range of possibilities for managing social life. Increasingly the notion of the commons and the practice of commoning is providing a renovated lexicon based on already existing practices and possibilities to organize resources and perform collective management out...

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding aut...

This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing new geographies of the European Union’s borders that complicate notions of a tightly bounded and easily delineated ‘Schengen space’ or ‘Fortress Europe’. Under policy frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Global Approach to...

On 9 November 2010, in Chapel Hill, geographers John Pickles and Sebastian Cobarrubias and anthropologist Maribel Casas met with Sandro Mezzadra to discuss complementarities in research interests around the emerging institutions, practices, and geographies of the European Neighbourhood Policy; transit migration and migration routes management; coun...

The EU's borders, and those of its member states, are shifting zones of power arranged by novel institutional strategies and the subsequent proliferation of legal texts, maps, technologies and actors, reconstructing where and what the border is. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of "border externalization" in the European Union, in particular th...

This intervention targets the much heralded demise of the map in geography and the recently proposed “rethinking” of maps. It comprises contributions from two political geographers, a military geographer, a political scientist, and two activist cartographers and argues that there is not so much a need to “rethink” maps, but to “re-engage” with the...

Social movements are arising in unexpected places, producing effects not nor mally associated with our traditional understandings of either politics or movements. No longer, and perhaps never, solely the highly visible, modernist expressions of resistance to the state, movements are not only enacting poli tics through protest and cultural contestat...

"The project of creating a world anthropologies nework challenges anthropologists to engage not only in worldwide communication but also with knowledge produced in non-academic contexts and in non-scientific realms of experience." Susana Narotzky (2006:133). The goal of this paper is to articulate a commonality between WAN and a particular activist...