Voici les éléments 1 - 10 sur 214
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Exploring the social organization of difference at the interface of mobility and peripherality: Ethnographic study in a Swiss valley
    This thesis sheds ethnographic light on the small Swiss valley of Val-de-Travers, a region of 12,000 inhabitants located in the canton of Neuchâtel, on the border with France. Inspired by critical and reflexive studies on migration, it proposes an in-depth analysis of the discourses and daily practices that participate in the construction of a local order in constant negotiation, at the interface of different forms of mobility and lived and situated experiences of peripherality. Based on a qualitative field study conducted between 2019 and 2021, this thesis apprehends the Val-de- Travers through two of its main and interwoven characteristics. On the one hand, the diversity of past and present mobilities that intersect. Indeed, for decades, countless foreign workers, cross-border workers, tourists, refugees, and residents of other Swiss regions have been crossing the region to work or live there. At the same time, young people, job seekers, families and retirees have left the valley in search of professional, educational, or economic opportunities. On the other hand, the Valley is characterized by its peripherality: a complex set of experiences and imaginaries that refer both to its asymmetrical political and economic relationship with a neighboring city (Neuchâtel); to a romantic celebration of the valley’s authenticity as a rural periphery sheltered from globalization and modernization; a supposedly superior value of seemingly unconditional solidarity; a region characterized by scattered settlement and low population density in public spaces; a region adjacent to a national border; or a tourist region with natural sites and industrial heritage. By adopting a posture at the interface, this thesis explores how the different forms of mobility that traverse and shape the valley articulate, resonate, or come into tension with the lived and imagined experiences of peripherality; and vice versa. Indeed, the position and evolution of the valley in the global, national, and cantonal political economy contribute significantly to the daily dynamics of selfidentification and social categorization. This thesis thus seeks to understand how people who visit, live, or work in this place make sense of their daily environment and negotiate the social organization of difference, namely the way in which differences between individuals and collectives, and the social categories associated with them, are produced, represented, appropriated, and organized. It shows how the lived and situated experiences of these different dynamics generate discourses and practices that participate in the emergence of an (imagined) community characterized by the coherent assemblage of its heterogeneity. By focusing on the everyday experiences of ordinary people, it also highlights how the categories, boundaries and regulations of the nation-state permeate everyday life and articulate with other social and symbolic differentiations beyond ethno-national categories and governmental logics. In the form of a collection of scientific articles, the analysis is composed of three parts, each illuminating not only specific dynamics of the articulation between mobilities and peripherality, but also proposing specific and original conceptualizations to approach this articulation. The first paper explores the emergence of what I call an imagined community of fate, which can be understood as the result of dynamic and nested forms of boundary-work in which the most important categories and markers are socioeconomic rather than nation and ethnicity based. The second article documents the discourses and everyday practices that participate in the emergence of a regime of (im)moral mobilities. Exploring in particular border mobilities (whether to work or to buy goods and services), I demonstrate how ordinary inhabitants categorize these mobilities in terms of good or bad and put in place informal strategies of regulation. The third article explores how the presence of people assigned to stigmatized categories of difference – in this case, refugees, cross-border workers and “cas sociaux” – generates varied and interrelated representations of experiences of peripherality. Depending on the situation, these categories of difference are presented as familiar strangers, as space invaders, or as peripheral figures.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Hospitalité transitoire. La part bénévole du régime migratoire. Logiques du soutien bénévole aux personnes en mobilité à travers l’Europe, perspectives ethnographiques d’un Refuge à la frontière franco-italienne
    Cette thèse s’intéresse aux pratiques de soutien aux personnes en mobilité à la frontière franco-italienne à travers l’approche ethnographique d’un Refuge. En utilisant une perspective de régime migratoire, je développe un cadre théorique qui permet d’étudier les micropratiques qui produisent l’hospitalité transitoire tout en tenant compte des limites contextuelles et matériels qui influent sur les engagements collectifs. Le Refuge est un espace où travaillent exclusivement des bénévoles – non-formé-e-s dans le domaine de la migration. Le soutien qui y prend forme fait office de première nécessité – repos, hygiène, repas chauds, soins et programmation de la suite du parcours de mobilité – ceci dans un laps de temps voulu court. Pour comprendre les enjeux qui se jouent dans ce lieu spécifique, je propose de mettre en lumière les processus de production du soutien à travers trois logiques centrales : l’humanitaire, l’urgence et la solidarité. D’abord, je mets en avant l’ambivalence du soutien humanitaire en montrant que les intentionnalités qui motivent les pratiques reproduisent parfois les effets du contrôle qu’elles visent à contourner. Ensuite, j’articule la logique des urgences en contribuant à élaborer les concepts d’urgence fonctionnelle et d’urgence stratégique. Tous deux sont construits dans les pratiques et traduisent le fonctionnement général du Refuge dans une dynamique d’hospitalité transitoire. Enfin, je présente la logique de la solidarité qui constitue une dimension centrale dans les mouvements contemporains de soutien humanitaire en Europe. J’analyse la fabrique de récits de solidarité comme un instrument habilitant et stratégique dans la permanence des actions menées, notamment dans le maintien de relations avec les pouvoirs publics locaux et les autorités. L’analyse éclaire les pratiques bénévoles à travers un prisme mettant en valeur les récits et les descriptions ethnographiques, et montre la manière dont les actions sont mues par des logiques centrales qui invitent à penser les pratiques bénévoles comme des processus d’actions au sein desquels s’entremêlent le contournement du contrôle autant que sa reproduction. L’argumentaire développé propose de dépasser l’écueil d’une réflexion binaire en réfléchissant aux pratiques de soutien comme des processus enchevêtrés et complémentaires dont l’élaboration et la mise en oeuvre traduit la participation d’acteurices non-étatiques à la gestion migratoire au sein du régime.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Pre-Print!! Migranticization
    (UK: ELGAR ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Global Migration, 2023)
    Migranticization can be understood as those sets of performative practices that ascribe a migratory status to certain people and bodies – labelling them (im)migrants, second-generation migrants, people with migration background, minorities, etc. – and thus (re-)establish their a priori non-belonging, regardless of whether the people designated as ‘migrants’ are citizens of the nation-state they reside in or not, and regardless of whether they have crossed a national border or not. Migranticization can be considered as a technology of power and governance; it places people in a distinct hierarchy which goes along with an unequal distribution of societal symbolic and material resources while it affirms a national ‘we’ within a system of global inequalities. The suggestion is to use migranticization as an analytical lens which makes it possible to investigate the uses of migration-related categories and their consequences in terms of power and ex/inclusion from/in a global system of inequalities and nation-states.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Placing regimes of mobilities beyond state-centred perspectives and international mobility: the case of marketplaces
    (2023) ;
    Jónsson, Gunvor
    ;
    ;
    Joris Schapendonk
    ;
    Van Eck, Emil
    Scholars have scrutinized the state-centered and sedentarist foundations of social sciences that pitch ‘mobilities’ against ‘places’ by arguing that places and mobilities always co-constitute each other. Contributing to this debate, this article deploys the concept of ‘regimes of mobilities’ to study how mobilities are not only ‘placed’, but also entangled in, and shaped by, different power systems. By regimes of mobilities we understand all the mechanisms that differentiate mobilities into categories and hierarchies. This article argues that linking the concept of regimes of mobilities to the study of places can help illuminate how the ordering and differentiation of diverse forms of mobilities play out in the everyday realities of particular places. We empirically demonstrate this argument through the study of outdoor markets in three European countries: the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Netherlands. We delineate different regimes of mobilities that together shape both access to, and the production of, markets. We conclude that the concept of regimes of mobilities helps to identify this intersection of multiple systems of rules, regulations and norms. Hence, the concepts allows one to direct attention systematically to the different power systems that affect the supposedly ‘mundane’ mobilities that constitute place and the skills required to navigate the related dynamics.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Symposium: Adrian Favell's The Integration Nation Deterritorialized and unfinished “integration nations”
    (2022-10-13)
    In my contribution to this symposium, I engage with Adrian Favell’s “integration nation” in two ways: I maintain that, in addition to what Favell suggests, the integration nation recently became deterritorialized by reaching out beyond its national borders, designing some people as “immigrants” and subjecting them to “integration policies” before they even leave their country. Governmentality of integration is therefore constitutive of and for border regimes. Furthermore, I propose to distinguish different configurations of the constitution and power of the integration nation in the North Atlantic West. Bringing in Switzerland permits additional insights into the power mechanisms of the integration nation: the linear conception of the new political demography remains in this case quasi “unfinished” as it is almost impossible to become a fully recognized member through citizenship. Yet, this does not mean that the case does not speak to the integration nation issue.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Culture as politics in contemporary migration contexts: the in/visibilization of power relations
    (2022-9-23) ;
    Korteweg, Anna
    In the 1990s, an essentialist, bounded understanding of culture delimiting (ethno-national) groups based on allegedly discrete sets of natural characteristics came to structure politics in North Atlantic migration contexts, justifying migrant exclusion or celebrating inclusion. Yet, how this idea of “culture-as-defining-attribute” works among people situated in everyday life remains understudied. We develop an analytical framework centred on discursive repertoires, sources of relational meaning-production, anchored in historical contexts, and embedded in power. Analyzing 125 essays written by Toronto and Neuchâtel undergraduate students, we demonstrate that using culture-as-defining-attribute results in an in/visibilization of power relations. Toronto students hypervisibilize a positively inflected conviviality across multicultural diversity, while invisibilizing racism and settler colonialism. Neuchâtel students visibilize the production of migranticized others, invisibilizing nativism and non-migrant/white structural privileges. We end with a plea for context-specific analysis of culture-as-defining-attribute and a deeper understanding of in/visibilization as a significant “missing link” in current analyses of culture and ex/inclusion.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Disentangling entangled mobilities: reflections on forms of knowledge production within migration studies
    (2022-8-23)
    Wyss, Anna
    ;
    European migration studies have been criticised for having certain epistemological and theoretical underpinnings that reproduce hegemonic structures, especially the ‘national order of things’ and colonial legacies. In this article, we propose the concept of ‘entangled mobilities’ to address some of these challenges. Entangled mobilities as a theoretical lens enables us to study specific global and transnational processes, the ways in which they are historically and locally situated, and how they materialise in individual mobilities of differently positioned actors within an unequal political global economy. This lens helps us simultaneously overcome nationality- and ethnicity-centred epistemologies, confront colonial aphasia, and be sensitive to the multiple inequalities and mobility regimes within which human mobilities evolve. Furthermore, the prism of entangled mobilities provides an ideal methodological departure point from which to systematically examine how human mobilities are intertwined and interdependent and to reveal how they are embedded in and shaped by asymmetric, historically evolved power structures. We propose three pragmatic entry points for mobilising the concept: in specific places, in terms of the intersections and interdependencies of different mobile people, and in the context of the biographical trajectories of individuals. Finally, we invite scholars from other fields, such as policy research, to innovatively adapt this approach to gain alternative knowledge and address inequalities.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Moving marketplaces: Understanding public space from a relational mobility perspective
    Research on outdoor retail markets has focused on the diverse ways in which markets constitute public spaces where diversity and social inclusion coexist with conflict and reproduction of inequalities. This approach has prompted existing studies to focus on place-politics in terms of group- and spatially-bounded processes. In this paper, we take a relational mobility perspective to show that markets are not delineated and fixed entities. By approaching them as spaces in-flux, we are sensitive to the ways markets are continuously made and remade anew each operating day. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in four European countries (the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), we argue that 1) the practice of mobility is key to understand how markets come into being; and 2) a mobility approach opens up new questions regarding (unequal) power relations in the production of public space as it articulates the ‘relational politics of (im)mobilities’. Although the locality of markets tends to be emphasised as a sign of quality in governmental and public imaginations, we illustrate that the coming-into-being of markets depends on social, material and institutional relations coming from elsewhere.