Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
In the intersection between critical border research and Science and Technology Studies, this panel aims at discussing the interpretative potential and possible limitations of the ontological turn –with its goal of overcoming the dualism human/non-human– for the analysis of agency and accountability in relation to violence against migrants at borders of the Global South and North. Official discourses tend to present migrants’ deaths as a fatality product of the hostile environmental conditions along the increasingly dangerous migratory routes. Critical scholars and activists though point out at the responsibility of the states and their migration policies based on securitization and aimed at dissuasion, for pushing migrants towards zones of abandonment, thus displacing accountability for their deaths towards non-human agents.
Neo-ontological, neo-materialist, critical feminist and relational perspectives have been engaging scholarly with the plurality, hybridity and entanglements of human and non-human agents. How can those approaches contribute to elucidating the role of rivers, seas, deserts and infrastructures of migration in border related violence? Is a post-anthropocentric gaze compatible with the efforts towards identifying political responsibility for migrants’ deaths? What conceptual vocabulary is needed in order to restore the political character of non-human agencies involved in the border assemblage?
We invite papers that tackle these questions considering a wide range of deployments of violence (physical, spatial, slow, symbolic) and on the base of border geographies of the Global South and North, in order to explore comparatively the specificities and commonalities.
