Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion

Vehicles, infrastructures, and environments are essential to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume explores the politics of migration and bordering across various sites, highlighting how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle. It examines empirically rich and diverse cases, such as Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' trajectories, infrastructures of escort, deportation train cars, illegalized migrants walking across treacherous mountain passes, and aerial geographies of deportation. Viapolitics interrogates the phenomenon of "migration," questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 11 February 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are essential to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of "viapolitics" to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, "Viapolitics" interrogates anew the phenomenon called "migration," questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested.

Contributors.
Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

Weight: 466g
Dimension: 296 x 338 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478014287