Wrecking Migrants Lives and Lifetime. The Production and the Political Economy of Injured Subjectivities
Jeudi 7 novembre 2024, 16h00 à 18h00, salle H-1220, Université Concordia
Résumé (conférence en anglais)
Asylum seekers are targeted by multiple extractive processes: they are object of datafication, bureaucratic inscriptions and are interpellated by humanitarian and state actors that ask them to tell their stories and the logistics of their journeys. Scholars have documented how value is produced from these extractive processes grounded in carceral economies (Coddington et al. 2020; Martin, Tazzioli, 2023; Morris, 2019). Yet, by focusing solely on extractivism, to be partially sidelined is how the political economy of refugees’ encampment generates injured subjectivities. Focusing on the Greek and the Italian contexts, this presentation draws attention to how governing refugees has been turned into wrecking their lives, by depriving them of water, clothes, edible food and cash assistance. How shall we conceptualize the active withdrawal of humanitarian aid, from the standpoint of the political economy of refugee governmentality?
This presentation suggests that both the analytics of slow violence and an exclusive focus on extractivism prevent from grasping that the political economy of refugees’ confinement is grounded in the production of injured subjectivities. The protracted deprivation reveals more than induced debilitation: it unfolds modes of exploitation predicated on the wrecking of migrants’ lives and lifetime. Far from producing bare lives, the active withdrawal of water, hygienic-sanitary services and food generates injured and suffocated subjectivities. The presentation concludes arguing that the making of injured subjectivities and the wrecking of lives are constitutive of the political economy of refugee carcerality: governing migrants is inflected as wrecking the lives and the lifetime of those racialized as migrants.