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Writings on the Wall: Textual Traces of Transit in the Aegean Borderscape
Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society (KS), Department of Global Political Studies (GPS).
University of Gothenburg.
2019 (English)In: Borders in Globalization Review, ISSN 2562-9913, Vol. 1, no 1, p. 7-21Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The Greek island of Lesvos has a centuries-old history as a site of departure, arrival, coexistence and resistance for the forcibly displaced. This migratory chronology, however, was overwritten by the unprecedented attention that Lesvos attracted during the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. This paper examines vernacular aspects of bordering, specifically the practice of border crossers and other groups standing in solidarity with—or against—them, to inscribe messages on walls in and around carceral and public spaces, viewed as a process of constructing and contesting borders from below. Closely reading numerous inscriptions collected around Lesvos reveals how borders are constructed, enacted and contested from below through borderlanders’ discursive practices on some of the very walls that constitute the EU frontier’s material infrastructure. This study aims to advance understandings of the historical continuity of the Aegean borderscape as a complex landscape of border effects and affects that exceed borders’ legal, infrastructural and political dimensions, while also highlighting the persistence and importance of personal agency, self-authorship and identity reclamation by border populations even in the direst of circumstances.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
University of Victoria , 2019. Vol. 1, no 1, p. 7-21
National Category
International Migration and Ethnic Relations
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-17639DOI: 10.18357/bigr11201919243OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-17639DiVA, id: diva2:1450484
Available from: 2020-07-01 Created: 2020-07-01 Last updated: 2024-08-16Bibliographically approved
In thesis
1. Affective Borderscapes: Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the Southeastern Mediterranean
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Affective Borderscapes: Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the Southeastern Mediterranean
2019 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In the wake of a sociopolitically volatile era, which is increasingly characterized by the intensive and extensive proliferation of borders, the management of borders and migration are considered as predominantly rational and dispassionate processes. Their functions and filtering mechanisms, however, are increasingly underpinned by the instrumental top-down exertion of affective power and by the cultivation of emotional dispositions among political communities. At the same time, compliance to- or contestation of these forces also manifests ‘from below’ through transgressive patterns of human mobilities and mobilisations around borders, which are similarly affectively-driven. This Ph.D. dissertation examines the impact of various actors’ affective practices on the construction, enactment and contestation of affective borderscapes in the southeastern Mediterrane-an and its Aegean appendix, and explores how those processes manifest and link up at multiple scales across space and time from a perspective that accounts for the affective dimensions of border regimes aside from their legal, infrastructural and political causes and consequences. Through long-term ethnographic engagement with communities and individuals that have been passing through or inhabiting several locations along the much-fraught Aegean borders in times of major socioeconomic and geopolitical upheaval, this thesis formulates and puts forth the concept of affective borderscapes. They are liminal, overlapping landscapes that function as contact zones and as charged fields of affective interaction between assemblages of animate and inanimate actors. As an original contribution to border and migration studies, this concept bears great potential for the acquisition and mobilisation of knowledge, as well as for the design and application of human-centered policy and practice.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Malmö University, 2019. p. 355
Series
Dissertation Series in Migration, Urbanisation, and Societal Change ; 10
Keywords
Migration, Affect, Borders, Borderscapes, Mediterranean, Greece, Aegean Sea, Lesvos, Refugees
National Category
Social Sciences
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-7434 (URN)10.24834/isbn.9789178770250 (DOI)30226 (Local ID)978-91-7877-024-3 (ISBN)978-91-7877-025-0 (ISBN)30226 (Archive number)30226 (OAI)
Public defence
2019-12-06, Niagara Hörsal B 02, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, Malmö, 10:15 (English)
Opponent
Available from: 2020-02-28 Created: 2020-02-28 Last updated: 2024-02-23Bibliographically approved

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Tsoni, Ioanna

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