With the theme Breaking the Rules? Power, Participation and Transgression, the 15th SIEF congress took place online from 19-24 June 2021, hosted by the University of Helsinki.
Making Mobility Rules
Ignacio Fradejas-García and Kristín Loftsdóttir participated in the panel Making Mobility Rules, chaired by Ignacio Fradejas-García (University of Iceland) and Noel Salazar (KU Leuven), having Helena Pettersson (Umeå University) as panel discussant.
Infrapolitical Resistances of Migrants to the EU Regimes of Mobility
Ignacio and Kristín gave a presentation entitled Infrapolitical Resistances of Migrants to the EU Regimes of Mobility which explores how migrants from different origins perform non-coordinated thousands of minor acts of resistance to institutional pressures, defined by Scott as infrapolitics. The presentation discusses an article on the making about forms of infrapolitical resistance that react against discourses and images of migration, religion, race, as well as political actions and policies of the multilayered (im)mobility rules of the internal and external European mobility regimes. Ignacio and Kristín take examples from different research projects conducted among precarious migrants (refugees, asylum seekers and migrants) across Europe, including fresh empirical data from their current investigation about the Atlantic migration route to the Canary Islands.
The panel presentations
The panel included a great group of scholars and presentations:
Antje Missbach (Bielefeld University) Facilitating transnational maritime movements Rohingya, the smuggling-trafficking nexus and arbitrary law enforcement;
Joris Schapendonk and Dawit Tesfay Haile (Radboud University) The sea, the system and the unspoken: Europe’s mobility regime as a navigational continuum;
Guido Nicolas Zingari (University of Bologna) and Dramane Cissokho Back (UCAD) To the future: mobility, migration and freedom in future-making processes among young Senegalese;
Viola Castellano (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning) Gambian migrants in Italy: building new forms of solidarity in the interstices of the humanitarian/securitarian nexus;
Elia Vitturini and Alice Bellagamba (University of Milano-Bicocca) Kerewan and Mansajang: Rules and morals of Gambian migrations in the present age of involuntary immobility;
Elizabeth Challinor (New University of Lisbon) Bolstering the image of the welcoming state: ethnographic insights into the workings of the mobility regime in Portugal;
Melissa Blanchard (CNRS), Bypassing European restrictive mobility rules through “inherited” Italian passports;
Lorena Izaguirre, Laure Sandoz and Christina Mittmasser (NCCR on the move, University of Neuchâtel) Informality as a resource for social mobility? Comparative evidence from migrant entrepreneurs in different locations;
and Miquel Martorell (Autonomous University of Barcelona) Vloggers, blogs, and books: Children navigating (im)mobility rules through imagination and virtuality.
