Abstract
The politicised debates on the detention and deportation of migrant individuals within Europe often overlook the implementation of policies and laws and more specifically the role of infrastructures used to carry out deportations. Recent research has highlighted the relevance of studying the infrastructures accompanying practices of migration enforcement as a crucial part of the implementation process.
Infrastructures, including networks and materials, are used to deport people from various sites and through various means; they are part of the mundanity of border enforcement but are also used to enact violent state practices. This contribution adds to the theoretical debates with original empirical insights on deportation implementation processes in Switzerland. The ethnography followed Swiss street-level bureaucrats, caseworkers in migration offices as well as police units, in charge of planning and executing deportation orders.
Interviews and participant observation allowed for in-depth analysis of old and new sites of deportations and how they render practices invisible to outsiders. At the same time, analysing the materiality of deportation disclosed how its mundanity is established through reinvented uses of seemingly everyday tools that are mobilised as elements for forced displacement.
Finally, the study of deportation infrastructure disclosed the performance of border control in which contestations of migrant individuals are strongly inhibited and state power materialises. The infrastructural approach highlights sociopolitical trajectories of power, knowledge, and contestations.
Deportation Procedures in Switzerland: Infrastructural Performances
Lisa Marie Borrelli, Haute Ecole de Travail Social,HES-SO Valais-Wallis
About the event series
STS-MIGTEC Circle is a small format which serves to reflect jointly on work-in-progress contributions related to the themes of interest to STS MIGTEC. The idea is to create a safe space for probing and experimenting with ideas, arguments, attempts of analysis, sense-making of empirical material. It’s the right space for you if you already invested substantial energy and dedication into that work, but you still feel the piece to be raw and fragile. We invite individual scholars – of all career stages – to take other interested scholars on board to jointly reflect and discuss with care and constructive feedback.