scholarly journals Into the Interstices: Everyday Practices of Refugees and Their Supporters in Europe’s Migration ‘Crisis’

Sociology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Fontanari ◽  
Maurizio Ambrosini
Keyword(s):  
Migration Policy ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Migration Crisis

This article investigates the interconnections between migration to Europe for asylum and the multiple ‘crises’ of the border regime that have occurred in recent decades. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic research with refugees in Italy and Germany, the article highlights the tensions between migration policy and legislation at the structural level and the agency of refugees. The case study focuses on a protest staged by refugees in Berlin and the active involvement of its civil-society supporters. The everyday practices of refugees, including building relationships with local residents, cross-border mobility within Europe and ‘inhabiting’ the grey zones where different national jurisdictions intersect, generate frictions that open up spaces of autonomy: the ‘interstices’. Territorial, social and judicial interstices develop out of the power relations in Europe’s migration ‘battleground’.

scholarly journals Borders and resilience: Asylum seeker reception at the securitized Finnish-Swedish border

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110000
Author(s):  
Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Border Controls ◽  
And Control ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation

The past decade has witnessed a shift from “open borders” policies and cross-border cooperation towards heightened border securitization and the building of border walls. In the EU context, since the migration influx of 2015–2016, many Member States have retained the re-instituted Schengen border controls intended to be temporary. Such heightened border securitization has produced high levels of anxiety among various populations and increased societal polarization. This paper focuses on the processes underpinning asylum seeker reception at the re-bordered Finnish-Swedish border and in the Finnish border town of Tornio. The asylum process is studied from the perspective of local authorities and NGO actors active in the everyday reception, care and control practices in the border securitization environment enacted in Tornio in 2015. The analysis highlights how the ‘success’ of everyday reception work at the Tornio border crossing was bound to the historical openness of the border and pre-existing relations of trust and cooperation between different actors at various scales. The paper thus provides a new understanding of the significance of borders and border crossings from the perspective of resilience and highlights some of the paradoxes of border securitization. It notes that although border closures are commonly envisioned as a direct response to forced migration, the everyday practices and capacities of the asylum reception at the Finnish-Swedish border are themselves highly dependent on pre-existing border crossings and cross-border cooperation.

A Space Sans Fear

2018 ◽  
pp. 183-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priyanuj Choudhury
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Built Form ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Pedagogic Practices ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Way

Fear is one of the foremost debilitating factors that hinder an individual’s growth, and one of the cornerstones of mainstream competitive schooling in India. The presence of fear in the process of schooling has great significance in the way it shapes an individual and affects learning. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the ways in which education can be imparted without the operation of fear, by looking at the everyday practices, rituals and built form of a KFI school in Bengaluru. Through an ethnographic exploration, the author attempts to interpret the micro processes of everyday life in the school and pedagogic practices employed across junior, middle and senior school classrooms that work in collusion to create an environment free of fear. Through a case study of contradictions, the author also looks at the possible factors that may work against the creation of such a space.

Is It Local … or Authentic and Exotic? Ethnic Food Carts and Gastropolitan Habitus on Portland’s Eastside

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan McClintock ◽  
Alex Novie ◽  
Matthew Gebhardt
Keyword(s):  
Local Food ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Ethnic Food ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

In this chapter, examine the location of ethnic food cart owners within Portland, Oregon’s food cart scene, and within the broader paradigms of local food and sustainability for which the city is known. Through an inventory of food carts, interviews with cart owners, and a case study of the Portland Mercado food cart pod, we explore how the everyday practices of ethnic food cart owners on Portland’s eastside reflect and differ from those of other food cart owners. Drawing on Bourdieu, we demonstrate how their practices in turn reshape the wider “gastropolitan” field of foodie tastes. We argue that cart owners unsettle the eco-centric values dominating Portand’s foodie culture by emphasizing authenticity and exoticism. The ability to capitalize on a particular set of gastropolitan values – local and organic or authentic and exotic – is geographically uneven, however; it depends on both the physical agglomeration of food carts espousing a particular set of gastropolitan values, and on their location within the foodscape, a position very much tied to economic processes of gentrification and displacement bifurcating the city.

Understanding Romanians’ cross-border mobility in Europe: movers, stayers and returnees

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-224
Author(s):  
Roxana Barbulescu ◽  
Irina Ciornei ◽  
Albert Varela
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Economic Resources ◽  
International Mobility ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday

This chapter investigates the everyday practices of cross-border mobility of Romanian citizens in the light of the concept of ‘space-set’ (Recchi 2013 and 2015). Using mixed methods, we distinguish between stayers, movers and returnees and examine the role of frequency, reason for travel, destinations and personal significance. Findings show that Romanians’ long-term mobility, motivated especially by work, is amplified by more short-term mobility in the form of holidays, trips or visits to friends and families abroad. However, not all benefit from the rise in international mobility: two thirds of the stayers did not cross the border in the past two years. This finding suggests that first, mobile Romanians are pioneers of everyday European integration (Recchi and Favell 2009) and, second, long-term mobility has a ‘sticky’ nature and predicts short-term mobility irrespective of individual socio-economic resources. These insights counter stereotypes of Romanians, and also question what we call the ‘migratisation of mobilities’ where all forms of mobility are assimilated to a migration paradigm.

scholarly journals Everyday urbanism and the everyday state: Negotiating habitat in allotment gardens in Berlin

Urban Studies ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Hilbrandt
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Informal Housing ◽  
Allotment Gardens ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
The City

This paper is an inquiry into the powers at play in the everyday practices of making the city, and the social and spatial relations through which those who inhabit its margins put these powers to work. This exploration is based on a case study that considers informal housing practices and their regulation in allotment gardens in Berlin. To trace the mechanisms through which residents work to stay put in these sites, despite regulations prohibiting residency therein, the paper relates a debate on the transformative potential of the everyday to anthropological literature on the workings of the state, embedding this discussion in relational approaches to power and place. Joining these perspectives, I argue that the gardeners’ possibilities to stay put depend on the ways in which they meditate the presence of regulatory practices through their relations to state actors or institutional frames. These mediations not only highlight that people co-construct the order that takes shape, but also point to the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion built up along the way.

scholarly journals Border and Memory in the village of Koshovice

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefania Vasilaki ◽  
Maritina Vlachaki ◽  
Nicos Koutsourakis
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Local Perceptions ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Borderland Communities ◽  
The Village ◽  
Inter State

This article focuses on the village of Koshovice, Albania, where its residents are part of the officially recognized Greek minority. The local perceptions of the community are discussed as linked to the Albanian-Greek border and its presence in the collective memory. After the borderline creation in 1913, local residents were divided between the two neighboring countries. The ethnographic data collected underline the experiences and the everyday practices of the villagers of Koshovice, especially during the period of the Albanian socialist state between 1945 and 1991, when the border became almost impenetrable. The article then discusses the changes after the fall of socialism and the opening of the border in the early 1990s, especially showing how the local borderland communities are still connected nowadays to each other despite the inter-state division.

Time, temporality and cultural rhythmics: An anthropological case study

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gonzalo Iparraguirre
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Chaco Region ◽  
Conceptual Distinction

This article presents the introduction and the update of an ethnographic research on temporality among indigenous groups, published in 2011 in its full version as a book in Spanish. It seeks to prove the usefulness of the conceptual distinction between time, defined as the phenomenon of becoming in itself, and temporality, defined as the human apprehension of becoming in a cultural context. Furthermore, the existence of non-hegemonic temporalities is exemplified by a case study of originary temporality with Mocoví indigenous societies in Argentina’s Chaco region. The methodology built for studying temporality in different social groups, termed here as cultural rhythmics, is also introduced. By studying different rhythmic experiences integrated in the participant observation, the rhythmic method enables us to interpret social facts that are implicit in the everyday practices of organisation, in the economic–political relations, and in the group’s worldviews.

scholarly journals Imperceptible Politics: Illegalized Migrants and Their Struggles for Work and Unionization

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Wilcke
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Union Membership ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
First Case ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Union Conference

This article argues that illegalized migrants carry the potential for social change not only through their acts of resistance but also in their everyday practices. This is the case <em>despite </em>illegalized migrants being the most disenfranchised subjects produced by the European border regime. In line with Jacques Rancière (1999) these practices can be understood as ‘politics’. For Rancière, becoming a political subject requires visibility, while other scholars (Papadopoulos &amp; Tsianos, 2007; Rygiel, 2011) stress that this is not necessarily the case. They argue that political subjectivity can also be achieved via invisible means; important in this discussion as invisibility is an essential strategy of illegalized migrants. The aim of this article is to resolve this binary and demonstrate, via empirical examples, that the two concepts of visibility and imperceptibility are often intertwined in the messy realities of everyday life. In the first case study, an intervention at the ver.di trade union conference in 2003, analysis reveals that illegalized migrants transformed society in their fight for union membership, but also that their visible campaigning simultaneously comprised strategies of imperceptibility. The second empirical section, which examines the employment stories of illegalized migrants, demonstrates that the everyday practices of illegal work can be understood as ‘imperceptible politics’. The discussion demonstrates that despite the exclusionary mechanisms of the existing social order, illegalized migrants are often able to find work. Thus, they routinely undermine the very foundations of the order that produces their exclusions. I argue that this disruption can be analyzed as migrants’ ‘imperceptible politics’, which in turn can be recognized as migrants’ transformative power.

Grounding local peace organisations: a case study of southern Sudan

2005 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Hilhorst ◽  
Mathijs van Leeuwen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Process Approach ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Southern Sudan ◽  
Central Attention ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Women's Voice ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Informal Settings

Since the early 1990s, building peace during and after conflict has been moving away from the conference tables of diplomats to informal settings created by local NGOs. The vast majority, if not all, of the peacebuilding policy and literature argues for strengthening local organisations as vehicles for peace. This paper starts from the observation that there is a dire lack of organisational perspective to the processes set into motion. Current local peacebuilding policy, we argue, is based on analyses that are far removed from the everyday practices of the actors engaged in peacebuilding. The paper offers instead a qualitative approach that gives central attention to the dynamics of peace organisations and the way conflict is experienced in the everyday life of local people. It analyses the case of one local women's peace organisation: the ‘Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace’. Peacebuilding is done by people, and the dynamics of their organisation are crucial for its success. The paper argues that a process approach to peace organisations will enhance agencies' efforts for local peacebuilding. Such an approach focuses on the question how actors in and around organisations give meaning to an organisation. The paper outlines this approach, presents five central properties of local peace organisations, and discusses what lessons can be learnt from this perspective for the practice of peacebuilding.

scholarly journals Negotiated Precarity in the Global South: A Case Study of Migration and Domestic Work in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (14) ◽  
pp. 210-227
Author(s):  
Zaheera Jinnah
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Global South ◽  
Employment Relations ◽  
Economic Vulnerability ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Discrimination In Employment

This article explores precarity as a conceptual framework to understand the intersection of migration and low-waged work in the global south. Using a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in South Africa, I discuss current debates on framing and understanding precarity, especially in the global south, and test its use as a conceptual framework to understand the everyday lived experiences and strategies of a group that face multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability. I argue that a form of negotiated precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around (il)legality and (in)formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion. Precarity as a negotiated strategy shows the ways in which people interact with systems and institutions and foregrounds their agency. But it also illustrates that the negative outcomes inherent in more traditional notions of precarity, expressed in physical and economic vulnerability, and discrimination in employment relations, mostly hurt the poor. This suggests the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding precarity in labour migration studies.

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