Unwanted sea migrants across the EU border: The Canary Islands

In the early 2000s, the Canary Islands emerged as the main gateway for unwanted sea migrants from Senegal into Spain. In this paper, I draw from a year of multi-sited ethnographic work to discuss the relationship between state actions to secure the border against these migrants, on the one hand; and smugglers and migrants' efforts to subvert those actions, on the other. My argument is that the relationship between the two is mutually constitutive: anti-immigration policy is a reaction to the actions of unwanted migrants, and unwanted migrants adapt to state efforts to seal the border against unwanted migration by finding and exploiting spaces of opportunity in the border. In the context of sea migration from Senegal to the Canary Islands, 2005 marks a major shift in this relationship. That year the European Union adopted a new framework for migration control (the Global Approach to Migration and Mobility), Frontex became operational, and Spain and Senegal deepened their cooperation to stop unwanted Europe-bound sea migration. This forced unwanted migrants to find creative ways to enter EU territory. I argue that combining the institutional and migrant perspectives allows us to explore the decentering of the state in the contemporary anti-immigration border regime, the emerging spatialities of the contemporary border, and understand the migrant's journey. This perspective also illuminates the messiness, violence, and multiplicity of interests involved in the bordering of Europe.     

Estate youth and complicated migration in Malaysia's oil palm plantations: the emotions of leaving and connecting back

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the emotional relationship young Tamil Indians have with oil palm plantations they are leaving behind or have left behind. Working in a small town in Malaysia, as well as in a large estate, we show how communal and individual aspirations of migration shape young people's mobility. While young people recognize the poverty and marginalization of plantation life, they continue to be emotionally and affectually connected to plantations through socio-cultural and spiritual practices. Post-migration we show how youth maintain estate connections, and argue that the pull back towards plantations is contrary to state-sponsored ideologies of modernization. Not all young people feel the same pull; many try to distance themselves from their estate roots through consumption and other social practices. Responding to calls for researchers emotions to be present in youth research, the paper also briefly reflects how adult emotions shape our understanding of young people's emotions of migration.     

The Effect of Job Advertising Policies on Interregional Labor Migration

A simulation model of a multiregional labor migration process is developed. Information about employment conditions in alternative regions is transmitted in a combination of three channels. The adopted emission policies directly control the amount of information available to potential migrants which, in turn, determines the potential migrant's perception of the level of welfare in the other regions. The effect of several different advertising policies on migration streams is examined. Employers can pursue a number of policies designed to maximize their return. Other agencies adopt policies that facilitate the matching process between unemployed workers and vacant jobs. Results are presented for a number of simulation experiments.     

Migrations and militant research? Some brief considerations

Abstract

The first part of the essay raises some doubts about the possibility of understanding research on migrations as ‘militant research’. A brief analysis of the discourse where research work is confined allows to glimpse at the deferral of two moments, that of militancy and of research. In such deferral a temporal dimension is at stake: first, the researcher wanders in the world or ‘wanders through the texts’, then he/she lingers on for a while in order to produce a discourse. It is necessary to interrogate this deferred dimension, not to elude it hence running the risk of reproducing the classical philosophical gesture of placing the speaking (and thinking or researching) subject at a ‘theoretical distance’. In the second part of the essay, the deferral between militancy and research is developed with reference to the struggle of the mothers and the families of Tunisian migrants, who left towards Italy and Europe right after the Tunisian revolution and who are ‘missing’ in the Mediterranean. The stubbornness of Tunisian mothers' struggle, which interrupts the path of virtualization of their sons, is countered to the oscillating ontology that migration policies enact, oscillating between the being and the not-being there of persons, dealing with the physicality of people, produced as migrants and rendering the bodies not completely adhering to space and as fantoms. The essay closes with a few considerations on the topic of a politics of testimony and its risks.     

The Mediterranean as a carceral seascape

In May 2019, 75 distressed migrants fleeing Libya were rescued by the merchant vessel Maridive 601 in the central Mediterranean Sea. With Italy, Malta, and Tunisia denying permission to disembark, the merchant vessel turned from a floating refuge into an offshore carceral space, leaving the migrants stranded near the Tunisian coast for 19 days. This article traces the migratory trajectories of the Maridive 75, as I will collectively refer to them, in order to show how EUrope's desire to deter, capture, and contain migrant mobilities has transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a carceral seascape. While offshore carcerality is not specific to EUrope's southern maritime border and also not a novel phenomenon, increasingly restrictive migration policies have dramatically reshaped the Mediterranean borderzone over recent years, multiplying infrastructures, technologies, and spaces of confinement. Interrogating the Mediterranean Sea as a carceral space generates insights into an ever-growing panoply of carceral but mobile forms of governance seeking to discipline and police unauthorised and precarious human movements, both at sea and on land. At the same time, as this article demonstrates, unruly migrant mobilities and struggles at sea continue to expose the often-conflictual processes at work in the production of the Mediterranean carceral seascape.     

‘Knowledge that moves’: emotions and affect in policy and research with young migrants

ABSTRACT

Migration is an emotional experience, and so is the policy and research work associated with it. Yet, discussions on emotions and affect remain largely absent from the literature on children and youth migration. Writing auto-ethnographically, I revisit my research with/about young Lao migrants with the aim of teasing out how emotions, of young migrants, of my own and in policy making emerged in relation to various dimensions of young people’s migration. On this basis I make the case for appreciating emotions as knowledge. While emotions are ‘moving’ in an affective sense, I proceed by arguing the productive dimension of emotions through the idea of the emotive as ‘knowledge that moves’. I substantiate this point by discussing instances in which emotions as a particular form of knowledge ‘move’ research decisions, policy making processes, theorizing the youthful dimension of migration as well as the interpersonal relations through which ethnographic research is realized.     

‘Like it,don’t like it,you have to like it’: children’s emotional responses to the absence of transnational migrant parents in Lombok,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences and emotions of children in rural East Lombok, Indonesia, who stay behind with relatives or neighbours while their parents leave the country for work. The article contributes to recent scholarship of children’s experiences of transnational migration in Southeast Asia by drawing out the complex emotions of children who stay behind. Based on research conducted in four ‘sending’ villages, the article describes children’s lived experiences of their parent’s transnational migration, and their intense feelings that whether they ‘like it or don’t like it’, they have no choice but to acquiesce to their parents’ long, often indeterminate absences. The research suggests that stay-behind children are entangled in community anxieties pervading the emotional economy of transnational migration, including the embodied emotion of shame (malu) which shapes children’s responses to parental absence. By focusing on children’s own views and experiences, we contribute to growing debates about the implications of migration for children’s rights and well-being in Southeast Asia.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particularly acedia, honor, and compassion—that have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today's society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert's assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public.     

Local territorial attachment in times of jurisdictional consolidation

Many European countries are changing political boundaries at the local government level. Reforms consolidating local jurisdictions have recently been implemented in a number of countries, and more mergers/amalgamations are ongoing. We examine whether citizens' attachment to their local political unit is affected when municipal maps are redrawn. Our study is based on a dataset from Danish local governments with survey data from before and after a major reform of municipal mergers, and the traditional endogeneity problems are thereby circumvented. Drawing on Scannell and Gifford's tripartite model of person, place and process, we find that person characteristics affect local territorial attachment as well as the intersection between places of residence and the processes leading to the new jurisdiction. It is not an increase in the absolute size of the municipality (i.e., place) or the amalgamation as such (i.e., process) that affects the level of attachment, but rather the relative size of the former municipality compared to the new municipality and thereby the specifics of the redrawing of boundaries. When smaller municipalities are amalgamated with larger municipalities, the local territorial attachment decreases among citizens living in the smaller municipalities but not among citizens living in the larger municipalities.     

Mapping Illegality: The i‐Map and the Cartopolitics of “Migration Management” at a Distance

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.     

Policing intercultural encounters: adventures in Beijing

This article reflects on the notion that China is viewed in the West as a site of absolute cultural Otherness, and contributes to debates around the manner in which Euro-Chinese intercultural interaction is imagined in European thought. Adopting a perspective inflected by Foucault's representation of disciplinary power, and by critical work pursued in the field of Contact-Studies, it scrutinises European cultural artefacts that map Beijingese space, and the adventures in that space of the European subject. These artefacts, which deal with different Beijings, are Victor Segalen's Rene´ Leys; Pierre-Jean Remy's Le Sac du Palais d'E´te´; and Christian Garcin's Le Vol du pigeon voyageur. The essay shows that the novels defy our expectation that variant ‘distillations’ of China—Imperial, Republican, post-Maoist—might invite different representations. And it concludes that the novels examined evince a European desire not to represent Beijing, and China, as a zone of transcultural contact.     

Good sitting,looking and listening: the regulation of young children's emotions in the classroom

Increasing attention has been given in schools in recent years to emotions as part of children's development and as core to their learning. Yet limited attention has been paid to emotions in childhood research. Based on findings from an ethnographic study within a Scottish school with children aged 6–7 years, this article explores the construction and negotiation of emotions as a part of children's classroom experience. Children's bodies and emotions are highly controlled in the classroom but despite this control, children actively construct emotions in their everyday lives.     

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.     

“You can make it here!”: Producing Europe’s mobile borders in the New Gambia

European border externalization to “sending states” throughout Africa is a well-documented phenomenon. Less clear, however, is the role that African governments and implementing organizations play in border externalization, nor the precise mechanisms by which European borders are “mobilized” (Szary & Giraut, 2015) and projected into everyday spaces in “sending states”. Drawing on a case study of three different European border enforcement projects in The Gambia, I argue that a collaboration between the International Organization for Migration, the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, and the Gambian government makes Gambians themselves agents of the European border. Drawing upon Szary and Giraut's notion of “borderities” (2015), I illustrate how the border is projected into The Gambia through an articulation of humanitarian borderwork with developmental approaches intended to solve the “root causes of migration” (Zaun & Nantermoz, 2021). Furthermore, I argue that the Gambian government is not passive in the process of border externalization, but actively involved in interpreting and rearticulating European policies and narratives about migration. Following Adamson and Tsourapas' (2020) reworking of the “migration state” concept, I demonstrate the Gambian government's active interests in bordering its own citizens: simultaneously encouraging emigration for the sake of national “development” while immobilizing young Gambians as part of a broader strategy to cooperate with European states. This research illustrates both the immense value of a “borderities” approach to studying contemporary migration management, and the close association between borderwork and nationhood in African post-colonial states.     

Europe of love: re‐centring intercultural affairs

The present collection of essays is the first collective result of the research project ‘Europe: Emotions, Identities, Politics’ that is being conducted at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI), Essen.1 The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project. View all notes The approach of our research is that of a cultural history of Europe, and the focus is on the historical connection between the idea of Europe and a certain type of personal emotion. The project aims to explore the relationships between political forms of identity and cultural attitudes in the field of emotions in Europe. More specifically, it is engaged in understanding the relationship between the formation of identity in the European context, on the one hand, and the idea of courtly and romantic love, on the other. I have argued elsewhere that European cultural identity must be distinguished from the political version based on the sense of belonging to the European Union. In the course of this introductory essay I always refer to a cultural Europe.2 Cf. Luisa Passerini, ‘From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony’, in A. Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. The original inspiration for this type of research came to me at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, where I spent the year 1992–93; I continued the research at the European University Institute, Florence, in the years 1994–2002. The first product of this research was my book Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: Tauris, 1999 and New York: New York University Press, 2000) that takes 1930s Britain as a case study, by situating it within a European context of longue durée. The present project has been funded by the Kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschungspreis des Landes Nordrhein‐Westfalen from 2002 to 2004. Within its general framework, the members of the research group, directed by Luisa Passerini, have developed their own individual projects; they are Liliana Ellena, Alexander Geppert, Jo Labanyi, Ruth Mas, Almira Ousmanova, and Alison Sinclair. Guests of the project have been invited for periods of time up to a month; numerous seminars, workshops and conferences have been organised, with the participation of junior and senior scholars from various countries. The majority of the papers presented on these occasions will be published at the end of the project. View all notes This introduction is divided into a presentation of the project, the specific itinerary that we propose in this special issue, and some considerations on its thematic.     

ARE EMOTIONS A KIND OF PRACTICE (AND IS THAT WHAT MAKES THEM HAVE A HISTORY)? A BOURDIEUIAN APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING EMOTION

The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion. It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion‐as‐practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self (as body and mind), language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research.     

Narratives of emotion and anxiety in medical tourism: on State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney

This paper explores the emotional geographies of State of the Heart and Larry's Kidney—two nonfiction narratives about medical tourism wherein American patients and their caregiver companions travel abroad for life-saving surgeries. The paper has two main goals: first, to illustrate the importance of emotional geographies in medical tourists' lived experiences of travel and tourism, as well as the giving and receiving of transnational health care and second, to generate empirical, theoretical, and methodological discussions between geographical, travel, tourism, and health studies on the relevance of emotional geographies. Medical tourists' experiences of travel and health care have been usually examined as spatially distinct rather than as entwined phenomena. We address the above goals by discussing how the narratives of traveling thousands of miles to a radically different socio-cultural milieu in order to receive essential medical care produce two interrelated emotional geographies: first, they demonstrate the existence of ‘emotional amplification’ (increase in the intensity of emotions) and ‘emotional extensivity’ (increase in the range of emotions) and second, they show how anxiety is underpinned by proximity to Otherness, uncertain boundaries, and isolated decision making. We conclude by briefly addressing how our examination of these narratives can be usefully expanded.     

Of peasants and settlers: ideals of Portugueseness,imperial nationalism and European settlement in Africa,c.1930–c.1945

This article examines policies and ideas of European settlement in Africa through the lens of imperial rhetoric and nationalist imaginations in Portugal during the first decades of Salazar’s dictatorship. Even though European settlement in Africa was under discussion since Brazil’s independence, the debate was invigorated in the 1930s. This article will place the renewed interest within the wider context of transnational migration, world economic crisis and inter-European competition for colonial dominance before the Second World War. Although European settlement was perceived as necessary both in terms of domestic social regulation and international competition at the time, state-sponsored settlements in Portuguese Africa were not a reality until the worldwide process of decolonization had started. On the contrary, not only did Portuguese political elites not invest in settlement schemes, but they actually adopted measures to curb migration to the colonies up until 1945, contradicting their imperialist rhetoric at home. The author argues that the contradiction between rhetoric and practice needs to be analysed in light of the growing desire to intensify control over space and people in European settlements in Africa. Barriers to block undesirable migrants from the metropole were only one part of the process of forcing an idealized vision of Portugal and Portugueseness into reality in both the colonies and the metropole. This article concludes that policies and ideas of European Settlement cannot be dissociated from the anti-urban rhetoric and anti-modernizing agenda of Estado Novo.     

The political significance of Christine de Pizan's third estate in the Livre du corps de policie

Although the general historical context of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie (LCP), the Orleanist-Burgundian feud occasioned by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI, has long been recognised, the precise argument that the author wages through her unique configuration of the third part of the body politic has not been explored. This essay reads the LCP as an intervention into the escalating struggle for power between Charles VI's brother, the duke of Orleans, and his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. Christine's purpose emerges most clearly in her peculiar arrangement of the third part of her body politic, le peuple, where two points bear particular consideration: her inclusion of the University and her division of the ‘merchants’ across two separate categories, a repartition which seems to refer to the contemporary distinction between the highly-placed merchants of Paris and the butchers. Christine seems to be arguing that if the University were to make common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could force into submission their more restless brothers and sisters, the butchers and their thuggish followers, whom the duke of Burgundy would finally convince to rise up in 1413 in what has become known as the Cabochian Revolt.