Kolar Aparna, University of Helsinki: Reconstructing geographies of margins, doing europes otherwise
Which worlds are we constructing through our writing as scholars of migration and borders of Europe in EU today? What categories of subject/object are taken as foundational? What spatio-temporal frames and subjectivities dominate? I reflect on these questions to outline an agenda for building situated knowledges from experiences of movement historically produced as ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’ to undo fixity in linear spatio-temporal narratives of Europe but also of social-scientific analysis. Building on black and decolonial feminist scholarship I argue that thinking and sensing from the plural epistemological and ontological positions emerging from such movement (i.e. historically produced as ‘out of place’ and ‘out of time’) is essential to emancipate the categories of the migrant/refugee/other from scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place. I will then reflect on the implications of such modalities of being, knowing and relating for non-repressive relations of inquiry and doing europes otherwise.
Floris van Doorn, University of Helsinki: ‘Like Don Quixote against the windmills’: doing migration control in Ethiopia
How does the EU seek to externally manage African migration through the use of development cooperation? Zooming in on a particular example of ways to ‘tackle the root causes of irregular migration,’ this paper looks at how one such project financed by the EU Trust Fund for Africa has been implemented in the Gambella region of Ethiopia. Relying on 21 stakeholder interviews, this paper reads these European efforts of migration as a case of ‘frontier governmentality’.
Focusing on the relationship between the European Union as project initiator and the NGO’s as the funding parties operationalising projects on the ground, it transpires that managing the Ethiopian margins is anything but a straightforward undertaking. In appreciating the complex and messy nature of the relationship between project initiator and funding partner, the paper complicates our understanding of EU migration management initiatives in the African context. European efforts to manage these African spaces are not to be seen as top-down or unidirectional. Rather, managing migratory frontiers is a multidirectional affair seldom yielding unambiguous or ‘satisfactory’ outcomes.
Miika Tervonen, University of Helsinki: Uncovering histories of forced removal
The presentation addresses deportation – the forced removal of non-citizens from a state territory – as a site of selective nation-building and bureaucratic violence that is characterized by deep non-transparencies and historical amnesia. While deportation has become a central area in contemporary politics of bordering Europe, there is surprisingly little understanding of or even interest in why and how it has become so prominent. The presentation addresses forced removals as a long-term phenomenon in the case of modern Nordic history, highlighting four logics deeply embedded in histories of modern nation/welfare-state building: 1) socioeconomic selection, 2) racial/cultural gatekeeping, 3) deportation as a foreign policy tool and 4) guarding the administrative power of the state. It suggest ways to move beyond silences, including the use of oral history materials and reading administrative sources ‘against the grain’. More broadly, the presentation calls for an epistemological shift from a nation-state -centric perspective that omits those whom the state disposes itself of.
Reetta Toivanen, University of Helsinki: Refugee History of United Europe: To Remember or to Forget?
Research has shown that the idea of a unified European history leaves many inequalities and atrocities outside the narrative of unity. Like any story, the idea/l of Europe required a violent forgetting and even repression of certain memories, life stories, and experiences. The forgotten memories are sometimes only smothered, and smothered memories tend to resurface to find expression in new forms. The fact is that memories are as important to the process of European construction as anything that has had to and must be forgotten. This presentation offers a first insight into research on family histories of Sudeten Germans who were expelled from the Czech Republic to Germany after World War II. In East-Germany (Soviet zone), their grievances and home sickness was silenced immediately; everyone was supposed to be the same socialist. In West-Germany they were initially treated as refugees, but at the latest with the Cultural Revolution of 1968 their demands for or even the memory of their lost homeland were silenced. I am studying the second and third generations in several places using ethnographic research methods to understand what the silence meant in the family history and their understanding of Europe as a continent of flight. I will pursue the question of whether the silence on the refugee past can explain why minority rights are still a serious stumbling block for European politics today.
