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Papers by Maribel Casas Cortes
Politics, Apr 22, 2023
The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logi... more The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logic of exaggeration, inversion and irony. Beyond carnival events themselves, Bakhtin proposed this logic as a creative instance to foresee openings within an assumed normality. The conceptual gaze of the ‘carnivalesque’ helps to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This impasse worked as a corona-carnival in the midst of the current mobility regime. The use of ‘carnivalesque’ in this article is not related to the playful aspects of carnival as a parade, but to the potential of the carnivalesque impasse for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished. That carnivalesque momentum, marked by social norms placed on pause, is captured in artistic and linguistic production, acting as a collective legacy for imagining futures otherwise. This paper compiles some keywords which emerged during the corona-carnival impasse, each holding hopeful and dystopian glimpses of possible alterations to the status-quo. These linguistic productions question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities.
Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales
En este artículo sugerimos interpretar la migración como factor geopolítico, un factor que no est... more En este artículo sugerimos interpretar la migración como factor geopolítico, un factor que no esta siempre sujeto a las decisiones estatales. Realizamos una revisión de la literatura sobre la geopolítica de las migraciones, sobre todo centrado en el control migratorio, identificando sus limites y potencialidades. Después, presentamos la Autonomía de las Migraciones como una manera de complementar o retar conceptos asumidos dentro la literatura de la geopolítica de las migraciones como la primacía analítica de las actuaciones de los estados en materia migratoria. En base al trabajo de Yann Moulier Boutang, proponemos prestar atención a la capacidad propia de los movimientos migratorios para intervenir en transformaciones estructurales de tipo económico, político, cultural y legal. Este enfoque en las migraciones como factor geopolítico puede guiar futuras investigaciones y enriquecer nuestra comprensión de las transformaciones en las fronteras y de la geopolítica misma.
This dissertation examines the practice of activist research as a growing tendency within contemp... more This dissertation examines the practice of activist research as a growing tendency within contemporary social movements. European struggles working on the current transformations in labor --its increasing precarization in general, and its effects on care practices in particular-- constitute one of the most active sites of struggle at present within the restructuring spaces of the European Union. I investigate the intellectual and political implications of activist research in relation to these socially pressing problematics. I do so through archival research and ethnographic engagement with social movements' networks targeting and analyzing the emerging precarity-care complex. The explicit turn to knowledge production practices by social movements speak to the transformative potential of research embedded in processes of collective action and social struggle. I highlight the theoretical and political contributions made by a particular feminist project based in Madrid whose work ...
Citizenship Studies, 2019
Antipode, 2015
ABSTRACT Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, “Fortress Europe” con... more ABSTRACT Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, “Fortress Europe” continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non-EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to do so. Autonomy of Migration (AoM) offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility. AoM does not read this off-shoring of borders through the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers, but develops an autonomous gaze that supplements these institutional readings of apparatuses of capture with a view that takes as its starting point the ways in which border architectures, institutions, and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities. By engaging current EU externalization policies, this paper illustrates the shifting relationship between border control and mobility.ResumenA pesar de las actualizaciones tecnológicas recientes de la frontera en el perímetro de la Unión Europea, la llamada “Europa Fortaleza”, tanto como metáfora como realidad, continua sin poder controlar la migración irregular. En respuesta, los estados miembros de la Unión están restructurando sus sistemas fronterizos externalizando la gestión migratoria a países no miembros de la UE, delegando funciones de control migratorio a países fuera de la frontera europea. El enfoque de la Autonomia de la Migracion (AoM) ofrece un anáisis poco común para pensar los mecanismos de control fronterizo y sus objetivos de gestionar la movilidad humana. AoM no interpreta dicho desplazamiento de fronteras únicamente desde la óptica del poder estatal centralizado. AoM ofrece una mirada autonoma de la movilidad, complementando esas lecturas institucionales que enfatizan los aparatos de captura. Así, AoM enfatiza la turbulencia de las migraciones como parte constituyente, y no solo receptiva, de las arquitecturas, instituciones y políticas fronterizas. Este artículo sobre la externalización de las politicas fronterizas de la Union Europea ilustra la relación productiva entre control migratorio fronterizo y movilidad migratoria.
Insurgent Encounters, 2013
European Urban and Regional Studies, 2012
This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing... more This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing new geographies of the European Union’s borders that complicate notions of a tightly bounded and easily delineated ‘Schengen space’ or ‘Fortress Europe’. Under policy frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Global Approach to Migration, a process of economic and political regional integration is under way that is beginning to transform the ways in which non-accession neighbours and neighbours of neighbours in North Africa and beyond are articulated with the EU. Central to these changes are programmes, institutions and practices of both regional economic development and border routes management. This changing geopolitical and geo-economic approach to regional integration and the nature of European borderlands has at its heart a series of new spatial imaginaries, institutional actors and cartographic experiments that point to a project in process in which the rel...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011
Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space, 2018
This article, reprinted from a chapter originally published for Handbook on Critical Geographies ... more This article, reprinted from a chapter originally published for Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration, 2019 Katharyne Mitchel, Reece Jones and Jennifer Fluri (eds.), reflects on the origins of the spatial displacement of borders further away from apparent destination countries. Concretely, how the European Union developed the geographic imaginary of ‘concentric circles’ that underpins practices of contention thousands of kilometres away from its borderlines. Such a process unfolds thanks to the conditional collaboration from third countries to manage suspected migratory movements. Based on archival research of EU documents initially proposing this form of remote migration ‘management’, we unfold a genealogy of border externalization that uncovers a rather Eurocentric cartographic imaginary at work beneath expert-driven and neutral sounding policies. About the authors: Maribel Casas-Cortes was recently awarded a Ramon y Cajal research fellowship from the European Union and Sp...
The generative power of mapping speaks to the material effects produced by maps and their capacit... more The generative power of mapping speaks to the material effects produced by maps and their capacity to order particular social and spatial relations. By focusing on the role that maps and mapping practices play within the politics of migration the contentious field of actions and relations which determines who can move and in what condition –, we show how cartography is in fact used both as a practice for the control and government of mobility as well as a tool for advocating, facilitating and even embodying, border crossing. We make this point by engaging two stories related to the mapping EU’s external borders in which we have been directly involved as researchers and activists: the first one concerning the mapping of migrants’ routes, the second looking instead at the surveillance of maritime borders. In both cases, we point to an on-going “clash of cartographies” in the current flurry of charting borders and flows, showing how cartography works on the ground for both the world of...
This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of con... more This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of conflicting maps. On the one hand, there are official cartographies produced by and circulating among policy makers, border authorities, security think tanks and media outlets. While these institutional maps deploy the professionalism and neutrality associated with expertise, we point how they are driven by a restrictive logic of containment towards mobility. On the other hand, we introduce another set of maps, which are just as sophisticated, yet the product of embodied, experiential and activist knowledge(s) coming from those supporting and enacting a politics of freedom of movement. This paper showcases, and reflects on, the politics of institutional maps produced by border institutions used to envision and implement ongoing practices of remote migration control. Attention is further given to examples of counter-cartographies that show how controversial, problematic and inaccurate the in...
Dialogues in Human Geography
This Is Not an Atlas, Dec 31, 2018
Politics, Apr 22, 2023
The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logi... more The soviet social theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin developed the theory of the carnivalesque as a logic of exaggeration, inversion and irony. Beyond carnival events themselves, Bakhtin proposed this logic as a creative instance to foresee openings within an assumed normality. The conceptual gaze of the ‘carnivalesque’ helps to rethink the reconfiguration of actors and practices around mobility, borders and migration during the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. This impasse worked as a corona-carnival in the midst of the current mobility regime. The use of ‘carnivalesque’ in this article is not related to the playful aspects of carnival as a parade, but to the potential of the carnivalesque impasse for envisioning alternatives, which are not necessarily emancipatory but deeply ambivalent, grotesque and unfinished. That carnivalesque momentum, marked by social norms placed on pause, is captured in artistic and linguistic production, acting as a collective legacy for imagining futures otherwise. This paper compiles some keywords which emerged during the corona-carnival impasse, each holding hopeful and dystopian glimpses of possible alterations to the status-quo. These linguistic productions question assumed notions and practices of migration management, opening the social imagination to other ways of engaging with human mobilities.
Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales
En este artículo sugerimos interpretar la migración como factor geopolítico, un factor que no est... more En este artículo sugerimos interpretar la migración como factor geopolítico, un factor que no esta siempre sujeto a las decisiones estatales. Realizamos una revisión de la literatura sobre la geopolítica de las migraciones, sobre todo centrado en el control migratorio, identificando sus limites y potencialidades. Después, presentamos la Autonomía de las Migraciones como una manera de complementar o retar conceptos asumidos dentro la literatura de la geopolítica de las migraciones como la primacía analítica de las actuaciones de los estados en materia migratoria. En base al trabajo de Yann Moulier Boutang, proponemos prestar atención a la capacidad propia de los movimientos migratorios para intervenir en transformaciones estructurales de tipo económico, político, cultural y legal. Este enfoque en las migraciones como factor geopolítico puede guiar futuras investigaciones y enriquecer nuestra comprensión de las transformaciones en las fronteras y de la geopolítica misma.
This dissertation examines the practice of activist research as a growing tendency within contemp... more This dissertation examines the practice of activist research as a growing tendency within contemporary social movements. European struggles working on the current transformations in labor --its increasing precarization in general, and its effects on care practices in particular-- constitute one of the most active sites of struggle at present within the restructuring spaces of the European Union. I investigate the intellectual and political implications of activist research in relation to these socially pressing problematics. I do so through archival research and ethnographic engagement with social movements' networks targeting and analyzing the emerging precarity-care complex. The explicit turn to knowledge production practices by social movements speak to the transformative potential of research embedded in processes of collective action and social struggle. I highlight the theoretical and political contributions made by a particular feminist project based in Madrid whose work ...
Citizenship Studies, 2019
Antipode, 2015
ABSTRACT Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, “Fortress Europe” con... more ABSTRACT Despite technological upgrading of borders at the edges of Europe, “Fortress Europe” continues to fail as an effective means of controlling irregular migration. As a consequence, European states are restructuring their border regimes by externalizing migration management to non-EU countries beyond the border and creating new programs and policies to do so. Autonomy of Migration (AoM) offers a distinct way for thinking about border control mechanisms and goals of managing mobility. AoM does not read this off-shoring of borders through the lens of centralized and coordinated state powers, but develops an autonomous gaze that supplements these institutional readings of apparatuses of capture with a view that takes as its starting point the ways in which border architectures, institutions, and policies interact with and react to the turbulence of migrant mobilities. By engaging current EU externalization policies, this paper illustrates the shifting relationship between border control and mobility.ResumenA pesar de las actualizaciones tecnológicas recientes de la frontera en el perímetro de la Unión Europea, la llamada “Europa Fortaleza”, tanto como metáfora como realidad, continua sin poder controlar la migración irregular. En respuesta, los estados miembros de la Unión están restructurando sus sistemas fronterizos externalizando la gestión migratoria a países no miembros de la UE, delegando funciones de control migratorio a países fuera de la frontera europea. El enfoque de la Autonomia de la Migracion (AoM) ofrece un anáisis poco común para pensar los mecanismos de control fronterizo y sus objetivos de gestionar la movilidad humana. AoM no interpreta dicho desplazamiento de fronteras únicamente desde la óptica del poder estatal centralizado. AoM ofrece una mirada autonoma de la movilidad, complementando esas lecturas institucionales que enfatizan los aparatos de captura. Así, AoM enfatiza la turbulencia de las migraciones como parte constituyente, y no solo receptiva, de las arquitecturas, instituciones y políticas fronterizas. Este artículo sobre la externalización de las politicas fronterizas de la Union Europea ilustra la relación productiva entre control migratorio fronterizo y movilidad migratoria.
Insurgent Encounters, 2013
European Urban and Regional Studies, 2012
This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing... more This paper highlights the ways in which the emerging models of migration management are producing new geographies of the European Union’s borders that complicate notions of a tightly bounded and easily delineated ‘Schengen space’ or ‘Fortress Europe’. Under policy frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy and the EU’s Global Approach to Migration, a process of economic and political regional integration is under way that is beginning to transform the ways in which non-accession neighbours and neighbours of neighbours in North Africa and beyond are articulated with the EU. Central to these changes are programmes, institutions and practices of both regional economic development and border routes management. This changing geopolitical and geo-economic approach to regional integration and the nature of European borderlands has at its heart a series of new spatial imaginaries, institutional actors and cartographic experiments that point to a project in process in which the rel...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011
Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space, 2018
This article, reprinted from a chapter originally published for Handbook on Critical Geographies ... more This article, reprinted from a chapter originally published for Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration, 2019 Katharyne Mitchel, Reece Jones and Jennifer Fluri (eds.), reflects on the origins of the spatial displacement of borders further away from apparent destination countries. Concretely, how the European Union developed the geographic imaginary of ‘concentric circles’ that underpins practices of contention thousands of kilometres away from its borderlines. Such a process unfolds thanks to the conditional collaboration from third countries to manage suspected migratory movements. Based on archival research of EU documents initially proposing this form of remote migration ‘management’, we unfold a genealogy of border externalization that uncovers a rather Eurocentric cartographic imaginary at work beneath expert-driven and neutral sounding policies. About the authors: Maribel Casas-Cortes was recently awarded a Ramon y Cajal research fellowship from the European Union and Sp...
The generative power of mapping speaks to the material effects produced by maps and their capacit... more The generative power of mapping speaks to the material effects produced by maps and their capacity to order particular social and spatial relations. By focusing on the role that maps and mapping practices play within the politics of migration the contentious field of actions and relations which determines who can move and in what condition –, we show how cartography is in fact used both as a practice for the control and government of mobility as well as a tool for advocating, facilitating and even embodying, border crossing. We make this point by engaging two stories related to the mapping EU’s external borders in which we have been directly involved as researchers and activists: the first one concerning the mapping of migrants’ routes, the second looking instead at the surveillance of maritime borders. In both cases, we point to an on-going “clash of cartographies” in the current flurry of charting borders and flows, showing how cartography works on the ground for both the world of...
This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of con... more This synthetic piece engages the phenomenon of border externalization from the perspective of conflicting maps. On the one hand, there are official cartographies produced by and circulating among policy makers, border authorities, security think tanks and media outlets. While these institutional maps deploy the professionalism and neutrality associated with expertise, we point how they are driven by a restrictive logic of containment towards mobility. On the other hand, we introduce another set of maps, which are just as sophisticated, yet the product of embodied, experiential and activist knowledge(s) coming from those supporting and enacting a politics of freedom of movement. This paper showcases, and reflects on, the politics of institutional maps produced by border institutions used to envision and implement ongoing practices of remote migration control. Attention is further given to examples of counter-cartographies that show how controversial, problematic and inaccurate the in...
Dialogues in Human Geography
This Is Not an Atlas, Dec 31, 2018