Governing unwanted migration through the work of emotions

Description

This paper explores how contemporary European migration governance uses affect and emotions to govern (unwanted) migration. By juxtaposing two cases at each end of the migratory trajectory, we aim to show how emotions are used to bring the border alive both inside Europe and far away from the actual geographical border. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the interlinkages but also differences between the two cases examined: an emotionally charged IOM led information campaign targeting the local population in rural Senegal and a series of motivational interviews conducted by the Danish police and targeting rejected asylum seekers in Denmark. We demonstrate how emotions are being used in these interventions to draw morally charged spatial geographies of hope and despair to impact and direct the (im)mobility of unwanted migrant subjects. Additionally, we seek to disentangle the ambivalent and at times contentious encounters between the interventions and the people they target. As such, we analytically bridge cases that in the academic literature are often dealt with as separate phenomena to tell a more nuanced story of the interlinkages between the EU border externalization and internalization practises informed by contemporary European border governance logics.

Period	23 Apr 2021
Event title	What do we say to migrants throughout their journey?
Event type	Workshop
Location	Bruxelles, BelgiumShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International