No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Photovoice as an unfamiliar act of citizenship: everyday belonging, place-making and political subjectivity
Abstract
This article draws upon a photovoice project with people seeking asylum and with refugee status in Manchester, UK. It considers the ways in which resistance and political subjectivity can be mobilised by photovoice. The article documents where participants were resisting abjection. Firstly, through their engagement in everyday place-making and practices of belonging that were further made by partaking in the photovoice project; and secondly, through gaining political subjectivity and creating a new political community, one where no sovereign power was present. The work posits that engagement in photovoice is an unfamiliar act of citizenship because it is not normative in its form nor is it necessarily intended towards resistance. Moreover, the context in which the claims are being made is unfamiliar: through photography, creativity and a research process. This article reflects on what this means for our understanding of acts, citizenship and resistance.
... Şen, 2014). Biglin (2022) argued that individuals who participate in the production of a place will increase their sense of belonging to that place. Furtado and Payne (2023) suggested that active engagement in place-making practices, which occur as the transformation of the spaces where members of society live or use, also increases their commitment to society. ...
... This study utilises the participatory action research approach (Biglin 2022;Davis et al. 2020;Meligrana and Andrew 2003) and is designed as qualitative research based on case studies (Furtado and Payne 2023;Hashem, Wahba, and Nasr-Eldin 2022). The research was designed as a workshop where young planner candidates could convene and exchange their perceptions, thoughts, and ideas. ...
... For instance, a study involving African American women in Oklahoma, USA, used photovoice to explore their perceptions of neighbourhoods security (Davis et al. 2020). Another study on immigrants in Manchester, UK, collected data via photovoice on the meanings ascribed to place in the daily lives of participants, their place-making practices, and the ways they claim their sense of belonging and rights to the city (Biglin 2022). Given the practical limitations of publishing all photos, Davis et al. (2020) selected among photos based on research priorities and themes (Davis et al. 2020). ...
... Although these practices may be seemingly small actions, mundane, daily and routine practices can challenge authority in unfamiliar ways, so they gain significance as new sites of political engagement. These everyday routines then become subtle political tools to negotiate citizenship (Staeheli et al. 2012;Ní Mhurchú 2016;Kallio, Wood, and Häkli 2020;Biglin 2022). The struggle is not about a legal status, but for the recognition of rights and belonging through ordinary practices. ...
... He uses his artistic skills to highlight his community's claims against anti-Black racism. His art illustrates the creative and innovative practices through which citizenship is enacted, contested and reformulated (Ní Mhurchú 2016;Biglin 2022). His work speaks to the state of anti-Black racism, imagines an anti-oppressive future and empowers Black people. ...
This study examines the lived experiences of second-generation Black Jamaicans and investigates how they interpret Canadian multiculturalism while navigating racism in their everyday lives. There is no dearth of research on multiculturalism in Canada. However, this article makes a fresh contribution to debates on multiculturalism by exploring how multiculturalism is understood and articulated as a claim-making process by a racialized group under lived citizenship framework. It extends the discussions on multiculturalism from a state-centered analysis to citizenship from below. Drawing from 22 interviews with second-generation Black Jamaicans, this study maintains that citizenship is a dynamic process through which research participants make claims to rights and belonging and negotiate their position vis-à-vis the state and other citizens to put the ideals of multiculturalism into practice.
... It highlights the agents' capacities to act politically regardless of public authorities' "formal" authorization by enacting their political subjectivity (Isin, 2009;Lewicki and O'Toole, 2017). The concept is recently being used and enriched by many scholars who examine acts of citizenship as a way of becoming political and acquiring a political subjectivity by focusing on the political participation of different groups of individuals in different contexts (Çağlar, 2016;Caraus, 2018;Lewicki and O'Toole, 2017;Lewicki, 2017;Darling, 2017;Biglin, 2022). For instance, acts of citizenship are described as moments in which individuals, regardless of their formal status as citizens and non-citizens, constitute themselves as activist citizens through political activities, open forms of protests, and volunteering (Artero et al., 2022: 203-204). ...
This study explores the lived citizenship experiences of highly-skilled migrants through the analysis of 62 semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire (N=177) conducted in Budapest and Athens between October 2022 and February 2024. The study aims to understand and explain how citizenship is understood and appropriated by highly skilled migrants who develop multi-layered attachments as highly mobile individuals, reflecting on their everyday transnational lives in the urban setting of Budapest and Athens. The study suggests that migrants' understanding of citizenship is shaped based on an amalgamation of legal-political status laden with rights and duties, and an identity and multi-layered sense of belonging derived from their lived socio-economic, socio-cultural, and emotional experiences. This study defines lived citizenship as a sum of the relational process involving experiences of belonging and coexistence that individuals undergo in everyday life within and beyond states, in both public and private realms. The research argues that highly skilled migrants’ experiences and narratives demonstrate a distinct understanding of citizenship, which is conceptualized in this study as patriotic cosmopolitan citizenship, turning them into hybrid citizens. The study advances the analytical framework and thinking on the foundation, manifestations, and operationalization of citizenship from below, underlining the significance of affective and subject-defining aspects. This empirical research goes beyond the existing studies which focus on policy-oriented, macro-level analyses of highly-skilled migration, presenting a unique contribution to the production of knowledge on highly skilled migrants in Budapest and Athens.
... This convergence epitomizes the amalgamation of scholarly work pertaining to photovoice as a potent instrument of personal development and voice, as well as social critique. It connects to the body of literature exploring the utilization of creativity in the domain of arts in health to enhance subjective and imaginative spheres (Biglin, 2022;Huss, 2018;Malka, 2022;Pera et al., 2020). ...
This paper examines how older adults who participated in an online photovoice-based group intervention program reported their experience. In a qualitative-phenomenological study, in which 13 older-adult people participated, data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews and analyzed through content analysis. The findings point to three central themes: a) Challenges—technical difficulties, difficulties in finding a subject for photography, investing time in photography, and an emotional-intellectual effort to put their experience into photography; b) Growth: New knowledge and skills—acquiring new knowledge, acquiring skills, experiencing skills regardless of age, and empowerment; c) Meaning—reflexivity, the ability to project feelings onto images, connection to the outside world, mindfulness, ability to choose, creativity, and critical consciousness. The findings share the way in which the use of creative visual engagement with photography contributed to coping with various challenges and enabled various gains within the process among the older-adult participants.
... Most research that uses photovoice is done within health, education and refugee/migration studies (Sutton-Brown 2014). Focus is often on empowerment as a way of raising social awareness (Ammentorp 2007;Biglin 2022;Fountain et al. 2021) and engendering social change (Budig et al. 2018;Hergenrather et al. 2009;Jarldorn 2019;Thompson, Miller, and Cameron 2016). These projects for example led to a better understanding of maternal and child health needs, different from what staff typically prioritise and by that helped them adjust the priorities (Wang and Pies 2004). ...
... Based on the application of the photovoice methodology, this article bears in mind this complexity, taking as its entry point the experiences and perspectives of migrant women. Photovoice is a participatory visual method in which research participants are invited to take photographs to respond to diff erent questions and express their views of particular themes (Biglin 2022;Harper 2012;Scârneci-Domnişoru 2017). Th is participatory visual technique mediates migrant voices in a way that promotes creativity, critique, and counter-discourses while narrating their experiences as city dwellers (Datta 2012). ...
Framed in a project on conviviality and migration-led diversity in Santiago, Chile, this article presents visual narratives of neighborhood participation. Accounts of migrants’ public lives have turned to underlining mundane forms of conviviality and place-making. This visual essay shows how such dynamics can comprise a fertile terrain for public engagement in contexts of “crisis.” The account is based on a photo-voice exercise developed by three long-established migrant women of different occupations, age, and nationalities during the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that shaped the personal/public interface of their lives. I propose that photovoice, by endowing agency and producing situated knowledge, can illuminate migrants’ local engagement, making visible (creatively, descriptively, and symbolically) the connection between the personal and the public while counteracting dominant problem-based representations
of migrants.
This article discusses the foregrounding of migrant activism through a photovoice project that emerged organically from groups of undocumented South Asian migrant men in Greece. It argues that this collective creative action against the criminalization of migrant ‘illegality’ constitutes an active act of citizenship that contests, from below, exclusionary citizenship rights and formal modes of inclusion into the body politic of a nation state. Isin’s concept of ‘activist citizen’ (2008) allows us to interpret migrant participation as a creative political mobilization that challenged their formal citizenship exclusion. The act of becoming intentionally visible through photo-taking and the multimedia installation allowed them to undertake constructive resistance against their forced invisibility and migrant abjectness. By representing themselves as empowered activist-citizens, and by using their photos, videos, and texts as evidentiary material, the undocumented migrant workers sought to destabilize dominant imaginaries and discourses that present them as fearful, deviant masculine others.
Based on the critique of education for sustainable development (ESD) as a socio-political control element of ecological modernisation, we discuss the prefigurative potential of participatory photovoice research in schools in light of social-ecological transformation. We argue that engaging students in prefigurative practices of change in which (sustainable) counter-futures are explored in the (unsustainable) present can help to re-politicise ESD, and we view photovoice as a way to guide this transformative process. Drawing on examples from a participatory research project on the transformation of local food systems in Graz, Austria, we critically explored photovoice as a method of transformative education that creates power-critical spaces of possible futures in which (un)sustainable hegemony and collectively internalised patterns of thought and action can be questioned to envision and negotiate liveable futures for all.
This paper introduces notions of conviviality as both a research practice and a research outcome through an exploration of the racialised and gen-dered experiences of migrant mothers and young girls in the current hostile environment for migrants in the UK. We argue that innovative, participatory theater and walking methods constitute a convivial practice, particularly helpful for addressing the everyday lives of migrant families within the current racist climate in the UK, characterized by the effects of the hostile environment on migrant families. Furthermore, the innovative participatory arts and action research methods in this project allowed the creation of relations between research participants and with the research team. These methodological and conceptual tools, we argue can strengthen research that challenges and goes beyond current xenophobic and racist conflicts.The innovative methods support research for social transformation, challenging prevalent racist discourses on migrant families, through building creative groups to express and publicly share their lived experiences.
This article critically discusses the experiences of women who are seeking asylum in the North East of England and women who are mothers with no recourse to public funds living in London to address the questions posed by the special issue. It argues both epistemologically and methodologically for the benefits of undertaking participatory arts-based, ethno-mimetic, performative methods with women and communities to better understand women’s lives, build local capacity in seeking policy change, as well as contribute to theorizing necropolitics through praxis. Drawing upon artistic outcomes of research funded by the Leverhulme Trust on borders, risk and belonging, and collaborative research funded by the ESRC/NCRM using participatory theatre and walking methods, the article addresses the questions posed by the special issue: how is statelessness experienced by women seeking asylum and mothers with no recourse to public funds? To what extent are their lived experiences marked by precarity, social and civil death? What does it mean to be a woman and a mother in these precarious times, ‘at the borders of humanity’? Where are the spaces for resistance and how might we as artists and researchers ‐ across the arts, humanities and social sciences ‐ contribute and activate?
Full article available open access at https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/cjmc/2019/00000010/00000001/art00010#
Homelessness is a social, economic, and political crisis in the United States. In particular, the US–Mexico Border region has seen a surge of homelessness, specifically among veterans, women victims of intimate partner violence, and immigrants. In 2014, 12 persons in El Paso, TX, with experience of being homeless used the photovoice methodology to participate in a project titled, “The Voices and Images of the Residents of the Opportunity Center for the Homeless: A Visual Project on the Identity and Challenges Homeless Adults Face on the Border Region.” The project was led by faculty from the Department of Social Work and facilitated by graduate students from the Departments of Social Work, Sociology, and Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. In partnership with the Opportunity Center for the Homeless, a community-based organization, a gallery of photographs with respective narratives was produced along with a video documentary. The participants identified four themes: broken systems, invisibility, opportunities and what works, and growth and determination. These themes represent participants’ life experiences with homelessness and their aspirations. In addition to the photo gallery, participants supported the development of a Call to Action asking the community, policy, and decision makers to commit to changing the current social, economic, and political conditions affecting individuals experiencing homelessness. The gallery, Call to Action, and overall participant experiences with photovoice were shared during local, regional, and national conferences and events, including three State of the Homeless Conferences led by the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in partnership with the university.
Racialized migrant mothers are often cast as marginal to theoretical and political debates of citizenship, yet by taking seriously the contributions to cultural and caring citizenship they make, we challenge the racialized boundaries of citizenship. Drawing on theories of enacting citizenship, that is, challenging hegemonic narratives of who can legitimately claim to contribute to citizenship, we explore migrant women’s mothering through participatory theatre methods. Through analysis of participatory action research (PAR) with migrant mothers in London, we emphasize the significance of embodied and affective meanings for challenging racialized citizenship. The theatre methods allow participants to develop collective subjugated knowledges challenging racialized, gendered and classed stratifications of rights, burdens and privileges of caring citizenship. This draws attention to the important role of creativity of the self as an aspect of both cultural and care work for understanding racialized migrant mothers’ citizenship.
Several studies have described the condition of asylum seekers as being on the threshold or in-between structures. Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Agamben’s state of exception have been used extensively to analyse this condition, mostly to show the negative implications of the ambiguous legal (non-) status. This article argues that the condition of liminality provides an intensified doubleness of impossibility and possibility for action, which casts a different light on conceptualizing agency. Without disregarding the downside of this liminal, in-between condition, the article shows that the lack of ‘normalized’ connectedness to the new structure combined with physical distance from the past structure, enables reflection and feeds the power of imagination. This can lead to alternative (yet conditional) forms of agency, such as delayed agency and agency from marginal positions. Through the narratives of asylum seekers living in Dutch asylum seeker centres, the article shows the potential of transforming non-places, such as asylum seeker centres, into those in which existential meanings can emerge (even if partial). Considering these sources of agency has great implications for the short-term well-being of asylum seekers and the long-term inclusion of refugees in their countries of residence.
In July 2013, the UK government arranged for a van to drive through parts of London carrying the message 'In the UK illegally? GO HOME or face arrest.' This book tells the story of what happened next.
The vans were short-lived, but they were part of an ongoing trend in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate toughness on immigration. The authors set out to explore the effects of such performances: on policy, on public debate, on pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. This book presents their findings, and provides insights into the practice of conducting research on such a charged and sensitive topic.
The e-book is online! http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=625583
OPEN ACCESS: available to read online www.oapen.org/search?identifier=625583
http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526113221/
Varieties of sound-based research methods have been used for exploring participants' relations with environment, space and place. For example, soundwalking, field-recording and audio guides have all been employed to help research participants become attuned to the sonic environment. Some of these have been used as participant-led approaches, enabling participants to devise walking routes and produce their own soundscape compositions. This paper explores these various uses and reports on two primary research collaborations that adopt mobile, participant-led approaches, in which participants negotiate the precise nature of the research collaboration. Furthermore, it examines diverse methods for disseminating soundscape recordings that emerge from such projects. The examples presented here reveal that sound-based research can be employed to do more than attune participants to sonic environments. This research highlights instances of productive, participant-led research that reveal diverse strategies for disseminating this work. There are many channels and media through which sound work can be made available to a wider audience, across disciplines and beyond academia. Reflexively adopted, dissemination through web and social media, exhibition spaces and other public events offers researchers and their participants a performative complement to the publication of work through journal articles.
The study of the political agency and subjectivity of refugees and
migrants has become an increasingly important topic within migration studies. Migration involves struggles around fundamental social and political issues, namely mobility, residence, and citizenship rights. Expressions of this struggle can be found in local actions against detention, deportation, and other border controls; campaigns for regularization and status; the revival of sanctuary cities; and global struggles for freedom of movement. However, the traditional concepts and frameworks of migration do not adequately take into account the full dynamic range of migrant practices of political subject-making. This article analyses the “autonomy of migration” literature within migration studies and critically assesses whether the concepts from this perspective can be mobilized to understand the political agency and subjectivity of migrants. While the autonomist approach to migration makes vital and dynamic contributions to our understanding of migrant political agency, its dismissal of citizenship as an exclusionary concept would benefit from a more nuanced approach.
Constructing undocumented immigrants as a security threat has allowed the US government to justify extraordinary measures that have pushed immigration enforcement increasingly inward from the border to states, counties, municipalities, and sheriff and police departments. The Secure Communities program, which integrates federal criminal and immigration databases to identify and deport undocumented immigrants, represents only the latest attempt. Most of the academic literature on local immigration enforcement has elaborated on the diffuse, ubiquitous and often paralyzing nature of the biopolitical power of the state vis-à-vis undocumented immigrants. In contrast, in this article, we focus on the contestations that challenge and go beyond repressive state power. We conceive of these not simply as a reaction to state techniques of power, but as productive and affirmative power that promotes alternative imaginaries and institutional change. As the Obama administration has sought to roll out the program to every jurisdiction in the country, it has been met with opposition from immigrant advocates, community leaders, and local law enforcement officials. Using the Washington DC metropolitan area as a case study, we examine the diversity of socio-spatial strategies that advocates have deployed to challenge the Secure Communities program and the articulations of alternative discourses of community and security. We also consider the broader implications of these practices for the immigrant rights advocacy movement and for theorizing resistance. More generally, the case illustrates the efficacy of and the challenges faced by civic activism in contesting dominant modes of governance and systems of authority.
The article explores the mothering work of a group of Kurdish women in London as enactments of citizenship. Rather than focusing on their integration, it foregrounds the migrant mothers' ability to disrupt hegemonic citizenship narratives and bring into being new political subjects. They co-construct diasporic citizenship, through their mothering work, producing their children's cultural identifications as both British and Kurdish. These identifications are contingent, involving intra-ethnic contestations of legitimate Kurdish culture. Kurdish migrant mothers' cultural work is not simply about making nation state citizens. By giving meaning to cultural continuity and change, the mothers reference multiple levels of belonging (local, national and diasporic) which challenge state boundaries. The article shows that although mothers play a key role in constructing their children's cultural identities and their articulation in ethnic and national terms, they also contest the meaning of ethnic minority cultural practices and group boundaries, potentially disrupting hegemonic narratives of good citizenship as ethno-national.
Over the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of migrant illegality with absolute exclusion, emphasizing that formal exclusion typically results in subordinate inclusion. Irregular migrants integrate through informal support networks, the underground economy, and political activities. But they also incorporate into formal institutions, through policy divergence between levels of government, bureaucratic sabotage, or fraud. The incorporation of undocumented migrants involves not so much invisibility as camouflage – presenting the paradox that camouflage improves with integration. As it reaches the formal level of claims and procedures, legalization brings up the issue of the frames through which legal deservingness is asserted. Looking at the moral economy embedded in claims and programs, we examine a series of frame tensions: between universal and particular claims to legal status, between legalization based on vulnerability and that based on civic performance, between economic and cultural deservingness, and between the policy level and individual subjectivity. We show that restrictionist governments face a dilemma when their constructions of “good citizenship” threaten to extend to “deserving” undocumented migrants. Hence, they may simultaneously emphasize deservingness frames while limiting irregular migrants’ opportunities to deserve, effectively making deservingness both a civic obligation and a civic privilege.
The securitisation of migration in Western states has resulted in an array of restrictive laws and policies that raise important questions about the relationship between protection and the political. New technologies of control (such as detention) and strategies of exclusion (such as deportation) are rapidly undermining—indeed, effectively criminalising—national cultures of asylum. This article critically analyses how these measures are being contested and countered by the anti-deportation activism of undocumented non-citizen people in Canada. How are these campaigns re-casting the question of ‘protection’ in the face of deportation efforts by the Canadian state? This is a significant issue because the capacity to decide upon matters of inclusion and exclusion is a key element of sovereign power. In the case of asylum seekers, the ability to decide who will and will not be provided with protection is interpreted in this paper as a focal point where the state (re)founds its claim to monopolise the political. Consequently, disputes over who has the authority to protect, who will be protected, and under what terms and conditions, can reveal new problematisations as well as new ways of thinking and acting politically. Employing the conceptual framework of abject cosmopolitanism, this article seeks to understand how these campaigns are, and are not, reformulating the terms of political community, identity and practice.
The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current moment. This becomes particularly evident in certain types of contexts, fore most among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or not-yet-formalized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-a-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in order to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I delineate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary currents of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are dynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational.
This article outlines a research project that used participatory action research (PAR) and arts practice (ethno-mimesis) to explore the senses of belonging negotiated by asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in the English East Midlands. At the core of this project was a walking event in which refugees and new arrivals guided long-term residents through the city, tracing an imaginary and real journey that linked the here and now with the then and there. Reflecting on the ways that walking evokes and invokes, this article suggests that while walking should not be privileged as a way of knowing, it has certain sensate, embodied, relational and collective attributes which rendered it particularly useful as a means of exploring the importance of being-in-place among a group whose lives are often depicted as markedly transnational.
Belonging is a notion both vaguely defined and ill-theorized. Scholars in various social disciplines often take this notion for granted, as if its meaning is somewhat self-explanatory. Others tend to equate it with the notion of identity, citizenship, or both. By relying on a critical reading of an extensive literature across academic disciplines, this study aims to offer an analytical framework for the study of belonging. I argue that belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place (place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging). The risk of focusing only on one of these two dimensions is to fall in the trap of either a socially de-contextualized individualism or an all-encompassing social(izing) discourse. The open question is whether the increasing cultural and ethnic diversification of contemporary societies can lead to the formation of communities of belonging beyond communities of identity.
By challenging the state's prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, political movements by and in support of migrants and refugees are forcing questions about what criteria, if any, can and should be used to determine who can claim membership in the political community. To illustrate the complexity of this politics this article analyzes the major demand that underscores every campaign undertaken by non-status refugees and migrants in Canada: a program that would allow them to "regularize" their status. Notably, these campaigns are being directed at both the state and city levels of governance. Together, these are two sites in which claims and counter-claims about community, belonging, and citizenship are being made by, for, and against non-status immigrants. In each case, migrant political agency is asserted in places meant to deny, limit, or repress it. The article argues that the significance of these sites is that they allow for non-status refugees and migrants themselves to act as mediators or translators between the city and nation, between polis and cosmopolis.
This book shows how democratic progressive politics can happen and how it is happening in very different arenas. The author takes an intensive look at a range of contemporary political movements and shows how, to one degree or another, they exemplify the political thought of Jacques Rancière. Following an overview of Rancière's thought, the author considers the following groups: the Algerian refugee movement in Montreal for citizenship, the first Palestinian intifada, the politics of equality and identity politics in relation to the Zapatista movement, a local food co-op in South Carolina and an anarchist press in Oakland. Essentially, the book shows how political theory and practice can enlighten one another, and in an age of cynicism, fear and despair, the author suggests that there is hope for the possibility of progressive democratic action.
This paper outlines scholarship on resistance within geography. Its contention is that conceptualisations of resistance are characterised by a predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume to constitute resistance. Asking what we risk ignoring if we only focus on predetermined, recognisable resistant forms, the paper revisits some of the fundamental assumptions (of intention, linearity and opposition) that underpin accounts of resistance. It calls for geographers to engage with resistance in emergence. The paper concludes by detailing what this might look like in practice, including intersections with work on potentiality, incoherent subjects, agentic materiality and speculative futures.
This article relates the Foucauldian theorisation of self-surveillance to the contradictory (non)presence of racialized labouring bodies of South Asian men in rural Greece. The disciplinary mechanism of temporary labour and migration regimes, exercised through migrant illegality and threat of deportations, works efficiently to make the men conform to a certain set of societal behaviours, erase their presence from Greek public spaces, and extract productive labour efficiently from them. By drawing on interviews of undocumented Indian and Pakistani male migrants in Greece, the article shows how ‘illegality’ and potential deportability shapes their strategies of staying in the country. The men self-surveil and regulate their movements by ‘containing’ themselves in their dormitories after work. This self-imposed isolation, through spatial segregation, deflects attention away from Greece’s restrictive immigration and labour regimes, based on differential exclusion based on class, skills, and professional education. It prevents local Greeks from building solidarity with them and, in doing so, avoid dismantling deep-rooted and widely prevalent discourses of Islamophobia and xenophobia.
In this article, the authors analyse the news photojournalism of the 2015 European migration ‘crisis’ as a political encounter between western publics and arriving migrants, where the latter are not simply ‘the represented’ but people who act within the photographic space. Inspired by Azoulay’s view of photography as ‘civic duty’, where ‘those represented continue to be present there at the time they are being watched in the photograph’ and, in so doing, actively call for a response from their publics, the authors ask the question of who acts and how as well as what bonds of civic duty such action puts forward for those publics. At the heart of these questions on agency lies a conception of arriving migrants as specifically vulnerable actors – people whose very precarity becomes a resource for meaningful action. This visual analysis of front-page news images across nine western countries, (84 images in June–November 2015) demonstrates that their photojournalism of migration enables two types of political encounters with arriving migrants: ‘action on migrants’, where migrants are mainly acted upon within the procedural encounters of border institutions, and ‘action by migrants’, where migrants act upon and affect others within existential encounters that can potentially touch upon people’s emotional and activist sensibilities. While, in line with the canons of photography and migration studies, both types of political encounters restrict precarious agency within the binary positions of victimhood and threat, it is the latter, ‘action by migrants’ that has the potential to break with such binaries and cast vulnerability as resistance – as deliberate exposures of the body to the power of the border, which present migrants as political actors in activist practices of transnational solidarity.
This essay analyzes the photographs taken by two emerging female Kashmiri photojournalists who have come of age in the latest round of mass resistance by Kashmiri youth against the Indian state. Taken in Indian-occupied Kashmir from 2013 until the present, the photographs highlight two forms of protest: one is the protest of the Kashmiri female photographer, seeking to document everyday life under the occupation, and the other is the actual form of protest, be it one of resistance or resilience, depicted in the photograph. The essay showcases how these photographs serve as a counter-memory to the nationalist narratives provided by the Indian state and civil society.
Committed to exploring democratic ways of doing research with racialized migrant women and taking up the theme of “what citizenship studies can learn from taking seriously migrant mothers' experiences” for theory and practice this paper explores walking as a method for doing participatory arts-based research with women seeking asylum, drawing upon research undertaken in the North East of England with ten women seeking asylum. Together we developed a participatory arts and participatory action research project that focused upon walking, well-being and community. This paper shares some of the images and narratives created by women participants along the walk, which offer multi-sensory, dialogic and visual routes to understanding, and suggests that arts-based methodologies, using walking biographies, might counter exclusionary processes and practices, generate greater knowledge and understanding of women’s resources in building and performing cultural citizenship across racialized boundaries; and deliver on social justice by facilitating a radical democratic imaginary.
The article argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co-existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border-guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters.
The burgeoning field of 'visual social science' is rooted in the idea that valid scientific insight into culture and society can be acquired by observing, analyzing and theorizing its visual manifestations: visible behavior of people and material products of culture. Reframing Visual Social Science provides a well-balanced, critical-constructive and systematic overview of existing and emerging modes of visual social and cultural research. The book includes integrated models and conceptual frameworks, analytical approaches to scrutinizing existing imagery and multimodal phenomena, a systematic presentation of more active ways and formats of visual scholarly production and communication, and a number of case studies which exemplify the broad fields of application. Finally, visual social research is situated within a wider perspective by addressing the issue of ethics; by presenting a generic approach to producing, selecting and using visual representations; and through discussing the specific challenges and opportunities of a 'more visual' social science.
This book explores the impact of transnational migration on the views, feelings, and practices of home among migrants. Home is usually perceived as what placidly lies in the background of everyday life, yet migrants’ experience tells a different story: what happens to the notion of home, once migrants move far away from their “natural” bases and search for new ones, often under marginalized living conditions? The author analyzes in how far migrants’ sense of home relies on a dwelling place, intimate relationships, memories of the past, and aspirations for the future–and what difference these factors make in practice. Analyzing their claims, conflicts, and dilemmas, this book showcases how in the migrants’ case, the sense of home turns from an apparently intimate and domestic concern into a major public question.
Paolo Boccagni is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. His main research areas are transnational migration, social welfare, care, diversity and home, and his publication record includes articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Housing, Theory and Society. He is also Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project HOMInG – The home-migration nexus: Home as a window on migrant belonging, integration and circulation (ERC STG 678456, 2016-2021).
In April 2015, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on European leaders to respond to the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean by ‘stopping the boats’ in order to prevent further deaths. This suggestion resonated with the European Union Commission’s newly articulated commitment to both enhancing border security and saving lives. This article charts the increasing entanglement of securitisation and humanitarianism in the context of transnational border control and migration management. The analysis traces the global phenomenon of humanitarian border security alongside a series of spatial dislocations and temporal deferrals of ‘the border’ in both European and Australian contexts. While discourses of humanitarian borders operate according to a purportedly universal and therefore borderless logic of ‘saving lives’, the subjectivity of the ‘irregular’ migrant in need of rescue is one that is produced as spatially and temporally exceptional — the imperative is always to act in the here and the now — and therefore knowable, governable and ‘bordered’.
This paper considers the place of creativity within UK Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) as a way of developing understandings of resistance within these spaces. It draws upon empirical research undertaken within an IRC, to explore the role of improvised music-making between staff and detainees. This work arises out of a concern that framings of resistance within IRCs have been characterised by acts that intentionally challenge the particular manifestation of sovereign power within these sites, where non-citizens are incarcerated. This study interferes with the prevailing view that for an act to be considered resistance, it must be characterised by intent, and follows Foucault to argue that to resist something is to create something, as ‘inventive, as mobile’ as power itself. Consequently, this paper explores creativity as ‘poiesis’, drawing upon work by Agamben and Deleuze to explore the potentiality of improvised music within an IRC.
Conceptualising citizenship as an act rather than a status enables us to rethink the familiarity of both ‘who’ can be a citizen and the type of ‘practices’ that can be understood as citizenship. This paper focuses on unfamiliar practices of citizenship per se by exploring the liminal site from which intergenerational migrant youth resist the taken-for-granted space of citizenship through a turn towards vernacular music and language. It considers how citizenship is resisted here through the unfamiliar act of turning away from either identifying or, failing/refusing to identify with the nation-state. It explores the effect of this move in challenging narrow national linguistic and ethnic ideologies through the development of non-standard language practice and cross-cutting musical styles. It argues that citizenship is enacted in this move by creating a space in vernacular music and language for expressions of hybrid political identity and belonging.
This book explores the tension between universal principles of human rights and the self-determination claims of sovereign states as they affect the claims of refugees, asylum-seekers and immigrants. Drawing on the work of Kant's "cosmopolitan doctrine" and positions developed by Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib explores how the topic has been analyzed within the larger history of political thought. She argues that many of the issues raised in abstract debate between universalism and multiculturalism can find acceptable solutions in practice.
This paper expands on the quotidian perspectives of ‘ordinary cities’ and ‘everyday resistance’ and explores the migrant urbanisms that emerge out of movement, mixing
and exchange. The paper argues for a shift beyond a focus on encounter across racial and ethnic difference, to engage with whether everyday social practice can effectively
contaminate political practice. The question is raised within the understanding that everyday life is rooted in inequality, and extends to an analysis of migrant participation in city life as creative expression and everyday resistance. Against a pernicious migrancy problematic in the UK that defines migration as an external force assaulted on national integrity from the outside, I explore migrant urbanisms as participatory practices of reconfiguration within ordinary cities, where diversity and innovation intersect. At the core of this exploration is how migrants are active in the making of
urban space and urban politics.
This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post-political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper questions the tendency within “post-political” thought to strip the potential of modes of informal citizenship through arguing that minor acts of resistance are ineffectual and illusory. In response, the paper explores irregular migrant's “acts of citizenship”, and suggests that such prosaic acts can be powerful forms of political interruption through which new ways of seeing asylum are constructed. The paper concludes by suggesting that an incremental politics orientated around such acts of interruption is essential to challenge the material, affective and discursive closures of asylum domopolitics.
Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.
While feminist arts-based projects have gained legitimacy, theory guiding the use of visual images in field research has lagged. Drawing on psychoanalytic-feminist theory and participatory action research methods, the article presents a study carried out with women refugee and asylum seekers that focuses on their experiences in seeking a place of safety in the United Kingdom. The aim was to produce through photography and videography a collective account of asylum as a daily process. In discussing the study, the authors provide a psychoanalytic framework for working through ethical, political, and methodological dilemmas in the use of visual imagery in feminist research.
The paper examines the effects of intersecting social divisions on constructions of multi-layered citizenships and the politics of belonging in contemporary Britain. It starts with conceptual clarifications of the notions of citizenship, belonging and intersectionality and then turns to examine contemporary politics of belonging in contemporary Britain, focusing on the current debate on the 'death of multiculturalism' and on 'social cohesion'. It illustrates how the use of civic and democratic values as signifiers of belonging can end up as exclusionary, rather than inclusionary in that discourse.
The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.
Despite roots in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, the practice and study of soundscape composition is often grouped with, or has grown out of the acousmatic music tradition. This can be observed in the positioning of soundscape compositions juxtaposed with acousmatic music compositions in concert programmes, CD compilations and university syllabuses. Not only does this positioning inform how soundscape composition is listened to, but also how it is produced, sonically and philosophically. If the making and presenting of representations of environmental sound is of fundamental concern to the soundscape artist, then it must be addressed. As this methodological issue is outside of previous musical concerns, to this degree, we must look to other disciplines that are primarily engaged with the making of representation, and that have thoroughly questioned what it is to make and present representations in the world today. One such discipline is ethnography. After briefly charting the genesis of soundscape composition and its underlying principles and motivations, the rest of the paper will present and develop one perspective, that of considering soundscape composition as ethnography.
The issue of asylum has become the focus of intense debate over recent years, much of which is organized around questions regarding how far and in what ways increasing numbers of asylum seekers pose a ‘problem’ or a ‘threat’ to ‘host’ states. This book steps back from this debate in order to consider how, why and with what effects such questions have come to take such a hold in UK and EU contexts. Critiquing the securitisation and criminalisation of asylum seeking, it analyses recent policy developments in relation to their wider historical, political and European contexts, and argues that the UK response effectively produces asylum seekers as scapegoats for dislocations that are caused by the shifting boundaries of the nation state. Any move beyond such an exclusionary politics, it claims, requires a distinctly political re-thinking of asylum, as well as of citizenship more widely.