CfP "Infrastructures of Injustice", Cambridge-Singapore-Princeton Network workshop series
Dear All,
Please find below a new call for papers for a workshop "Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities” to take place at School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), on 25-26th Jan. 2019. This event is envisioned as a small workshop, but we have decided to open up the call to allow for a wider range of papers, particularly from mid-career and junior scholars. We aim to cover all air travel (by the most direct route) and accommodation expenses of participants. Please also note, a selection of presenters from the Singapore workshop will be invited to present their revised papers at Princeton University on 26-27 April 2019. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by Princeton University.
This Cambridge-Singapore-Princeton workshop series interrogates the interrelationships between infrastructures and injustice; alert to the manner in which infrastructures threads through the material, the conceptual, the ethical, and the affective. We seek work at the junctions of infrastructure and injustice to provoke a reconceptualization of injustice across multiple empirical settings, but particularly within regimes of migration and conflict in the Global South. We intend to achieve this through delving into key ways in which the interactions of human and (in)tangible infrastructure materialize injustice today. Recognizing accelerating trends of securitization, financialization, and calculability means that interrogating the complicity of infrastructure in the moral economies and ethics of contemporary social life is urgent and imperative.
The Singapore workshop looks in particular at migration infrastructures, understood broadly as the “systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility” (Xiang and Lindquist 2014: S124). These mediating infrastructures have been labelled the “black box of migration” (Xiang, Yeoh and Lindquist 2012), for being inadequately understood by both scholars and policy makers. Within those configurations, the ambiguity of the role of the broker, who both enables as well as restricts the ability to move, become socially mobile and accumulate capital, marks the complexities of a transnational space of mobility. These intermediaries are not just part of the human infrastructure of international movement, but work in concert with laws, state agencies, transport technologies, border management and telecommunications. It is in the interaction of these elements that situations of debt bondage, human smuggling, illicit trade and trafficking eventuate, producing movement for some while containing others. Interrogating these interconnections has implications not just for the steady international streams of marginalised labour migrants and immigrants, but also for increasing numbers of refugee populations seeking asylum and work across borders, as well as regimes of international relations and trade.
Starting from Xiang and Lindquist’s (2014) premise that the intensification of migration infrastructures has led to the involution of migration, this workshop seeks to draw out the specific modes in which migration infrastructures work to enable and perpetuate injustices, to migrants, migrants left-behind families, as well as in the receiving and sending societies and states. In keeping with a turn away from Eurocentric perspectives, the workshop invites papers that specifically interrogate how injustice(s), particularly in the Global South, are instituted and perpetuated. Papers should pay attention to the hybrid and fractured dynamics through which migration and cross border mobility unfolds; shaping boundaries, lives, and territory.
The Singapore workshop seeks to explore a set of concerns that are framed by but not limited to these questions:
- How are infrastructures temporally and contextually formed and how do they morph and change dynamically in relation to shifting circumstances and modes of migration and cross border mobility? What role does legal infrastructure play in the context of such movements?
- How is infrastructure conceptualised in reifying systems inequality and hierarchy within mobility regimes?
- What are the migration and mobility-related infrastructures that sustain, perpetuate and reify injustice(s)? Here we are looking for empirically grounded analyses that deconstruct the ways in which injustice continues to work. We are interested, for example, in intersections of social capital and public infrastructures in cases of forced migration, trafficking.
- How is injustice countered through infrastructural investment or alternative/pirate infrastructures? What are the discursive, material and performative strategies of structural subversion and individual resistance? How, for instance, does collective organisation depend on technologies of communication? (eg. informal organising and migrant NGOs)
- How does infrastructure cope with changing notions of what is just, across time and across place? When forms of infrastructure become obsolete, do new or reconfigured infrastructural forms become necessary to maintain unjust practices and perpetuate subjugation?
Please send an abstract of 250-300 words and a short biographical statement to Sandra Brunnegger ([log in to unmask]) and Laavanya Kathiravelu ([log in to unmask]) by 21st November 2018 and also state if you will be available for the Princeton meeting in April 2019. Those selected will also be expected to produce a first draft of their paper (of about 4000 words) a week before the event in Singapore for pre-circulation.
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