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 these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested. Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

The external border of the EU remains under permanent construction. Sabrina Ellebrecht engages with two of its primary building sites - the European Border Surveillance System (Eurosur) and the Refugee Boat. She analyzes how the function and quality of the EU's current political border is crafted, shaped, produced and eventually stabilized through these two mediators. Eurosur and the Refugee Boat mediate a level of Europeanization which has hitherto - and would otherwise have - been impossible. While Eurosur mobilizes the limits of border policing in various ways, the Refugee Boat functions as the vacillating European Other to legitimize both control and humanitarian interventions. The study shows the specific, if not constitutive, ambivalences of EU border policies, and explores the emergence of viapolitics.

This book analyses the diverse and complex interactions between the emancipatory practices of precarious (i.e. forced, vulnerable, undocumented or deported) migrants enabled by information and communication technologies, and the constraints imposed by technological tools used for surveillance and migration control. It explores the digital empowerment-control nexus by articulating the use of digital technologies - whether by migrants themselves, civil society actors or institutions - with their mediating role in the processes of empowerment, surveillance and migration control. Based on original empirical studies, the chapters bring contrasting and complementary insights into the use of digital technologies as agentic and/or surveillance tools in different national and supranational contexts (Turkey, Mexico, the United States, Switzerland, France, Romania, Greece and the European Union) and from different disciplinary perspectives (anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, law and deportation studies). Using different theoretical lenses, they demonstrate the varying degrees of (dis)entanglement between individual and institutional practices, at micro and macro levels. Helping readers to understand the ambivalent role of digital technologies in (forced) migration processes, The Digital Empowerment-Control Nexus can be used as a resource by students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers interested in digitally mediated migration practices and migration regimes. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

According to Michel Foucault, the 'history of the present' should constitute the starting point for any enquiry into the past. This collection considers the continued relevance of Foucault's work for thinking the history of our present and includes essays and interviews by Judith Butler, Judith Revel, Mark Neocleous, and Tiziana Terranova.

This volume addresses processes of human mobility in times of crisis from different scientific perspectives and at a global and trans-regional level. The first part sets out to discuss established paradigms in migration studies and politics in order to suggest new approaches to analyse mobility, migration and to challenge boundary making approaches. The second part presents empirical cases from Latin America and Spain to demonstrate how migrants challenge, negotiate and mobilize citizenship and belonging. The third part deals with the question how belonging is produced and identity is constructed at a transnational level. New information and communication technologies, human mobility but also the mobility of concepts, ideas and values foster these collectivization processes across and within physical and symbolic borders.

This book explores the asylum journey of non-European asylum applicants who seek asylum in Turkey before resettling in Canada with the aid of the Canadian government’s assisted resettlement programme. Based on ethnographic research among Syrian, Afghan, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Iranian, Somali, Sudanese and Congolese nationals it considers the interactions of asylum seekers with both UNHCR’s refugee status determination and Canada’s refugee resettlement programme. With attention to the practices of migrants, the author shows how the asylum journey contains both mobility and stasis and constitutes a micro-political image of the fluidity and relativity of attributed identities and labels on the part of state migration systems. A multi-sited ethnography that shows how the migration journey is linked to the production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the diffusion of produced knowledge among past, present, and future asylum seekers who form trans-local social networks in the course of their route, in Turkey, and in Canada. Tracing Asylum Journeys will appeal to sociologists and political scientists with interests in migration and transnational studies, and refugee and asylum settlement.

An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics. Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014-2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and "humanitarian borders"; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into "zones of death." Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders--and Europe itself--an "extreme infrastructure" obsessed with boundaries and limits.

Building on an abolitionist perspective, this book offers an essential critique of migration and border policies, unsettling the distinction between migrants and citizens. This is the only book that brings together carceral abolitionist debates and critical migration literature. It explores the multiplication of modes of migration confinement and detention in Europe, examining how these are justified in the name of migrants’ protection. It argues that the collective memory of past struggles has partly informed current solidarity movements in support of migrants. A grounded critique of migration policies involves challenging the idea that migrants’ rights go to the detriment of citizens. An abolitionist approach to borders entails situating the right to mobility as part of struggle for the commons.

Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingly digitally tracked and surveilled, and national and international policy-making draws on data on migrant movement, anticipated movement, and biometrics to maintain a sense of control over the mobilities of humans and things. Also, social imaginaries are constituted in highly mediated environments where information and emotions on migration are constantly shared on social and traditional media. Both, those migrating and those receiving them, turn to media and communicative practices to learn how to make sense of migration and to manage fears and desires associated with cross-border mobility in an increasingly porous but also controlled and divided world. The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration offers a comprehensive overview of media and migration through new research, as well as a review of present scholarship in this expanding and promising field. It explores key interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies, and how these are challenged by new realities and the links between contemporary migration patterns and its use of mediated processes. Although primarily grounded in media and communication studies, the Handbook builds on research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, urban studies, science and technology studies, human rights, development studies, and gender and sexuality studies, to bring to the forefront key theories, concepts and methodological approaches to the study of the movement of people. In seven parts, the Handbook dissects important areas of cross-disciplinary and generational discourse for graduate students, early career researcher, migration management practitioners, and academics in the fields of media and migration studies, international development, communication studies, and the wider social science discipline. Part One: Keywords and Legacies Part Two: Methodologies Part Three: Communities Part Four: Representations Part Five: Borders and Rights Part Six: Spatialities Part Seven: Conflicts

This contributed volume analyzes in depth how a border area is constantly reshaped as migration policies harden, and what kind of social, political and economic impacts are produced at local and international level. The study is focused on Ventimiglia, an Italian town located 6 km away from the French-Italian border on the gulf of Genoa with a long story of commerce, custom and smuggling activities related to its proximity to the frontier. While several projects have analyzed other symbolic places of the EU migration crisis such as Lampedusa, Calais and Lesvos, there is a severe empirical gap regarding Ventimiglia, a border town at the very geographic core of the Schengen area. This case study may provide emblematic insights into what European migratory movements are currently revealing in terms of the lack of shared responsibility between EU Member States, the EU common asylum system and respect for human rights, with increasing claims for national sovereignty by some Member States.