Footprints: Mobility, Clutter, and Activism along a European Migrant Trail

• Autores: Céline Eschenbrenner
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 6, 2023, págs. 730-735
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article attends to the politics of clutter along a European migrant trail. Drawing on a year of fieldwork with No Border activists supporting migrant mobilities from Italy to France in Ventimiglia, Italy, I take migrant clutter as a source of territorial anxieties, pointing to the porousness of national borders and the possibility for unauthorized passage despite repression. Through participation in the daily lives of activists as well as conversations with both migrants attempting to cross the border and borderland residents concerned about the discards left behind by migrants and those who support them, I examine migrant mobilities as they intersect with the environments they traverse and the other forms of movement that support, alter, or interrupt their own trajectories. From this perspective, migrant mobilities exist with and against other forms of circulation, from the seasonal circulations of tourists to the daily commutes of borderland residents. Clutter moves, I suggest, and cultivates political imaginations working against the criminalization of migrant mobilities. Attending to migrant clutter as traces of intersecting mobilities can help us understand what stories migrant belongings tell about movement and its control, about place, exclusion, and the possibility for transnational solidarity.