Rethinking biopolitical (B)ordering in EUrope: survival, migration and the politics of perseverance
Patteri, Antonella (2021) Rethinking biopolitical (B)ordering in EUrope: survival, migration and the politics of perseverance. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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PHD THESIS ANTONELLA PATTERI.pdf - Full Version Restricted to Repository staff only until 23 September 2025. Download (9MB) |
Abstract
The governance of migration as a ‘crisis’ in the context of EUrope forces us to rethink the ways in which strategies of (b)ordering are being deployed to maintain relations between borders and migrants. By considering (b)ordering, biopolitics and survival, this thesis aims to frame practices and discourses that limit migrants’ political potential. Migrants are confronted with (im)mobilities that (b)order their conditions to mere survival, life with death. Survival here epitomises this process of (b)ordering as the result of what (bio)politics considers relevant for administering ‘life’ and modes of governing that reduce migrants’ lives to mere survival. Through the production of migrants as surviving bodies - remnants in excess, as securitised and (de)humanised bodies inserted in continuous and overlapping processes of (b)ordering - this work follows migrants’ journeys with the aim of punctuating not just mobilities in space, or highlight multiple ways of (b)ordering, but also to provide a reading of ‘affirmative’ survival that accounts for migrants’ resistance. From the Mediterranean Sea to Rome and Calais, the realism of borders is confronted with modes of governing migrants that aim to reduce them to lives that should (only) survive, therefore delimiting their political engagements to it. As survival itself is a form of resistance, migrants’ struggles to life will be rearticulated through the language of the politics of perseverance as life as politics. The thesis argues that while (b)orderings aim to reduce life to minimal forms of survival, migrants, and their alliances with aid workers, and indirectly artists, have the potential to rearticulate life otherwise, bringing their ‘lived experienced’ to the core of life as politics. These engagements disrupt mere survival as a measure of how life should be lived politically.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Sep 2021 15:51 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Nov 2023 14:34 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/45819 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00045819 |
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