Art & Migration

Introduction

This research arc inquires into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities, through arts/design as well as other disciplines and practices. It concerns all the actors involved in these mobilities: the remarkable proliferation over recent years of heterogeneous human migration formations, including labour migrants and people seeking asylum, the border enforcement infrastructures that arise in response to these mobilities, as well as how these infrastructures incorporate market-based/migration industry actors. It will interrogate these complex alliances, antagonisms, and complicities, analysing or interpreting conditions where (nation-)states’ official infrastructures for border control coexist with migration industry infrastructures for border-crossing and market-based enterprises for border enforcement. These include border control through proliferating physical barricades, militarised policing, multilateral border cooperation, detention camps, deportation dragnets, and new strategies of surveillance; both formal and informal migration industry infrastructures (e.g. the outsourcing of migration visa processing, labour migrant recruitment agencies, remittance services, the rise of transit spaces along migration corridors, forged passport markets, migrant smuggling, amongst others); and private security contractors for offshore detention centres. Among many other conceivable avenues of inquiry, we will engage with such questions as: – How are lived experiences of these complex entanglements understood by differently positioned people as expressed in arts/design, activism, migration studies and other disciplines? – How do people counteract, subvert, circumvent, resist, take charge of the everyday practices of these entangled bordering infrastructures? – How can artists, academics, activist networks, and other civil society groups work together to challenge new forms of bordering in ways that are socially and intellectually relevant?