The Inter-Thematic Group on Migrations (ITM) was established in 2017 by a group of scholars interested in developing a critical framework to unravel the conundrum of images and imaginaries concerning migrant and asylum seekers. Since the beginning of its activities, ITM also aimed at involving activists as well as the protagonists of current migrations in a dialogue that cut across disciplinary fields and methods. Most importantly, ITM was funded to endorse the idea that the so-called crisis rather than being one of migrants and migrations is one of the European space and related conception of the global space.

To advance these objectives, ITM launched the Migrating Rights series of events on 10 December 2018, which was the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the name of the series suggests, the events so far held have focused on the complexity characterising the relation between human rights and migration from three complementing perspectives.

The first perspective explored the rights that migrants are entitled to and how these are articulated differently in different places. From this perspective, ITM had already organised the seminar Crimes of solidarity and the borders of Europe: the mobile infrastructures of migration support and the fracturing of humanitarianism, where the invited speaker Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths, University of London) examined the increasing (legal) criminalisation of refugees as well as those national subjects who have adhered to transnational practices of solidarity. To inaugurate Migrating Rights, ITM then organised the roundtable The next seventy years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: future struggles, contradictions and agendas, which brought national and international speakers together to discuss a non-Eurocentric understanding of human dignity and related future for human rights.

The second perspective focused upon the ‘rights that migrate from subjects’, or, as Cristiano Gianolla put it, how these rights come to be embodied differently from the same subjects when moving from place to place. From this perspective, ITM has built upon the workshop Migrations: narratives, spaces and…, wherein national and international speakers uncovered the ‘intimate spaces of the migratory experience, which included conflicts and forms of solidarity, and the seminar The everyday Life of Human Rights Law, where the invited speaker Kiran Grewal (Goldsmith College) discussed how, against mounting critiques, the lexicon of international human rights is still relevant to many migrant groups struggling for social justice.

The third perspective examined the sociotechnical apparatuses sustaining the perpetuation of the ‘crisis’ by deploying Science and Technology Studies (STS) as principal heuristic. From this perspective, ITM has capitalised on the knowledge exchange facilitated by the three-day long workshop How can Science and Technology Studies help to reflect on the political crisis associated with refugees and asylum seekers?, which convened national and international speakers to map how border and state surveillance technologies, infrastructures, standard classifications and protocols enable the reproduction of human suffering while upholding a façade of legality.

To conclude this first cycle of critical work, in collaboration with (De)Othering, ITM has organised the roundtable Borders, where the invited speakers Gaia Giuliani, Carla Panico, Irina Velicu and moderator Fátima Velez will open up a discussion that builds upon Sandro Mezzadra’s most important theorisations of the border. Taking his co-authored book Border as Method as starting point, the roundtable examines the contemporary uses of borders as well as the ways they have proliferated to interrupt, deter, pause the movement of people into national labour markets while also encouraging, facilitating and increasing the movement of capital and associated subjects.

Migration Border Barbed Wire, Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The roundtable Borders also kick-starts the 2020 Migrating Rights | Keywords series, ITM organizes in collaboration with (De)Othering. On the back of the productive conversations engendered in the past, and inspired by the collaboratively written article New Keywords: Migration and Borders, the events organised under the umbrella of this series follows a set of crucial keywords to critically investigate the various apparatuses characterising certain forms of migration as abject mobility. i.e. invasion, contagion, and risk. Accordingly, this second series is organised around the keywords #Interculturalism-and-Populism, #Border, #Middle Passages, #Humanitarianism, #Representations, #Operations, and #Counter-narratives.

In detail, the roundtable #Interculturalism-and-Populism will discuss how interculturalism and populism represent two seeming opposing ways of dealing with national identity as well as advance the proposition that they both iterate the colonial limitations of liberal democracies. The seminar #Middle Passages will be elaborating on the complex relations existing between colonialism, racism and the border. The seminar #Humanitarianism will be dissecting the regime through which national border concomitantly objectify and subjectify migrants. Conversely, the roundtable #Representations will gather anti-segregation and anti-racist activists/academics to untangle the public representations of migrants in Portugal and Europe. Similarly, the seminar #Operations will invite STS experts to share their knowledge of the logistic and technological aspects of territorial national borders. Lastly, the roundtable #Counter-narratives, will conclude the series of events with political grassroot leaders/academics mapping the strategies so far mobilised to counter the abjectification of migrant subjects in Portugal.

Overall, these events are meant to shift the focus of the Migrating Rights initiative from the embodied experiences of migration to the assemblages of discursive and material regimes set in place to interpose new subjectivities upon migrants as well as the strategies that migrant subjects mobilised to counter them. Likewise, they seek to bring the past back in the present or, put it more simply, connecting the current status of politics concerning the abject mobility of certain migrant categories with the colonial past of Europe, its hierarchies of human value, enforcement of extractive power alongside the establishment of affective regimes which naturalised the de-humanization on the non-white European subject.

Maria Elena Indelicato is a Visiting Research Scholar at Centre of Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra. She received her PhD from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney in 2014 and lectured at the School of Media and Communication, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University from 2015 to 2018. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants, she has published in race, feminist and cultural studies journals including Outskirts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Paedagogica Historica, Transnational Screens, and Postcolonial Studies.