Abstract
Conducting an ethnography of a state assemblage of migration and border control faces the problem of tackling an extensive, complex and rhizomatic ecology and brings the question to the fore how to reassemble its multiple worlds, entities, practices and issues. Referring to work on ontological methodology and based on a praxeography of the Moria Hotspot this paper suggests to use various mapping strategies that study heterogeneous actors, multiple worlds and their entanglements in a symmetrical and situated way.
While mapping may situate and trace multiple borderings and their forms of in-/exclusion, they also produce borders by following particular trajectories, assembling particular representations and bringing particular alternative forms of becoming into play. Therefore, this paper suggests to invert the orderings of each mapping and to look out for variations of enactments, tensions between actors and translation errors within the trajectories of circulation. It also opts for reaching out to further arenas that keep the critiques and issues raised by the researcher contestable and productive for other initiatives beyond academia. Through this ongoing process of re- and de-ordering the empirical inquiry remains a reflexive endeavor of ontological politics.
“Disentangling Assemblages of European Border Control through Praxeographic Mapping”
Silvan Pollozek (Digital Media Lab, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Germany)
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.