Anti-mobility politics and tactical migration: visibility, legibility and suspension, March 24, 11am, Balsillie School of International Affairs

[Sherilee Diebold-Cooze]

The Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and
the International Migration Research Centre

present


Anti-mobility politics and tactical migration:
visibility, legibility and suspension


Michael Collyer

Monday, March 24, 2013
11 a.m. in Room 143
Balsillie School of International Affairs

Michael Collyer is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Sussex, where he is also affiliated with the Sussex Centre for Migration Research.

Presentation Abstract
Over the last few years a politics of anti-mobility has been apparent in approaches to migration across the European Union, but particularly in the UK. Drawing on established approaches to visibility and legibility in analysis of state action, this paper argues that these recent developments highlight how the goal of the state is not the visibility of undocumented migrants but their legibility to state institutions. The paper then turns to empirical material from the end of the conflict in Sri Lanka, applying this framework to internal migration from the north and east of the country to the capital, which was met with a similar anti-mobility response. Extensive interview and survey data with migrants to Colombo allows an investigation of migrants' responses to this securitized approach. Although migrants' responses are highly disempowered they are far from passive. Indeed, migrants' responses can be read as highly tactical, playing on an intimate understanding of the key dialectic between visibility and legibility that they witness in state attempts to control mobility. In relatively few cases, migrants are visible but not legible to state bureaucracy leading to a suspended status of radical exclusion where human rights abuses were most frequent. This key area of concern challenges the ways in which visibility and legibility are typically seen in understandings of migration.



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