Paper short abstract:

This contribution explores, from an ethnographic perspective, what happens when waiting becomes normalized for asylum seekers living in French Reception Centers supported by the state and managed by NGOs. The paper invites to think about the intimate bond between waiting and confinement.

Paper long abstract:

French reception centers, supported by the state and manage by NGOs, constitute a rare resource as most of the asylum seekers cannot reach it. Asylum seekers are taken in charge by reception centers for the duration of the claims procedure. Living in these shelters constitutes a period of precarious stability as basic living needs are guaranteed. However, this is not without consequences, as the center is a space of ambiguity and confinement where practices swing between control and compassion. But the shelter is also a waiting place: waiting may be considered the "activity" of those who seek refuge in France. The asylum seekers I met have been waiting between six months and four years for their claims to be evaluated. During this period they cannot work and their legal status is, at best, precarious. I would like to raise here a set of related questions: what does it mean to be waiting in the shelters? What kind of waiting do they experience? What happens while waiting? Based on a long-lasting ethnographic study in centers for asylum seekers in the Parisian suburb, the aim of this paper is to explore what happens when waiting becomes normalized. Eventually, this contribution invites to think about the intimate bond between waiting and confinement.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a series of observations of a French “Retention centre” where deported foreigners are being confined, this contribution will try to address both the everyday “government” of the detainees, and the way they may subvert those forms of control, thus turning their “abject” condition into a potentially alternative form of political subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a series of observations conducted in a French "Retention centre" where expelled foreigners await their removal, this presentation will emphasize the tension between two contradictory dynamics. First, retention centres are repressive places, where the "deportability" of foreigners is continuously materialised by the direct and physical grip of state force. However, those centres simultaneously remain places where both confinement and deportation can be contested through official or informal canals, thus enabling "abject" detainees to claim for themselves alternative forms of political subjectivity.

The contribution will first focus on the specific regime of "government of the detainees" inside the retention centre, and the way it daily reproduces the "deportable" condition of the inmates through coercive and non-coercive techniques. It will then address the ways in which detained foreigners may challenge those forms of control, by adapting their strategies of subversion to the centre's organisation. We shall focus on their use of the ambiguous status of NGO representatives - officially included in the "retention staff", but who remain non-state actors giving an opportunity of contact with the media or Human Rights advocates outside. But contentious detainees may as well create "sanctuarized" spaces inside the centre itself, by making their own body "undeportable" through self-inflicted violence, or even trying to create a public space for collective protest. The conclusion shall seek to evaluate the impact of this turning of "abject" individuals into real "subjects".

Paper short abstract:

The will of states to control movement of people have created contested spaces of sovereignty at the borders, populated by a “floating population” of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to be deported. The paper will focus on these practices of border detention, which involve national political devices for the administration of alien populations as well as security constructions around the notions of citizenship and frontier.

Paper long abstract:

Practices of border control in Western democracies have led the European Union in the past two decades to build its frontiers in terms of camps and to literally detain people within the borders. The will of states to control movement of people have thus created contested spaces of sovereignty at the borders, populated by a "floating population" of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants to be deported. The paper will focus on these extra-territorial zones of detention - the "waiting zones", which involve national political devices for the administration of alien populations as well as security constructions around the notions of citizenship and frontier. While dislocating the topology of the border, practices of border detention have emerged and solidified along two axes: firstly, technical adjustment in the law and the legalization of administrative practices; secondly, the management of alien populations within an hybrid confinement system co-administrated by the police, private companies and humanitarian care.

Facing the new modalities and changing spaces of movement, how do states work out their borders and 'thicken' them into spaces where people live, are confined, selected, displaced? What do these ambivalent processes of deprivation teach about evolving regimes of government in the liberal rule of law?

Analyses are based on a field study in the "waiting zone" of Charles de Gaulle airport (Paris), and interviews with detainees who were admitted on the territory after facing several attempts of deportation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses some topics related to a fieldwork in an Italian area of arrival and confinement of boat people. The analysis will approach the liminar passage of the migrants from the sea to the camp and the local representation and use of the phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a fieldwork in the island of Lampedusa, the main place of arrival of unwanted migrants from Africa to Italy, the paper deals with the issue of what happens before the confinement of the migrants in the centre dedicated to their administrative detention. This is a "space of exception" closed even to human rights organizations and, very often, to Members of the Italian and European Parliament. This restriction has induced me to focus my observation on the treatment of the immigrants' bodies at the landing quay, where Médecins Sans Frontières and Border Guard aid and discipline the newly arrived migrants in order to transfer them to the camp.

Working "under the shadow" of the inaccessible space of the camp permits us to discover a grey zone, open to a mediatic eye, where takes place a "spectacle of the border" in which the salvage of desperate people and the arrest of dangerous illegal aliens are somehow indistinct. Such an ambivalence has great consequences in providing material to the illegal immigration discourse, producing the immigrant as bare life and obscuring the legal production of illegality and the political instance of the border crossing.

Finally, the paper analyses the representation of the phenomenon produced by the population of Lampedusa, an island with a tourist-based economy. It is shown how the presence of an institutional "machine" physically separating the boat-people from the public places has become a strategic object against whom is possible to articulate some political claims on local issues.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to explore humor as a form of resistance but also to try to go beyond the oppositional power/resistance scheme.

Paper long abstract:

Based on fieldwork in a "Local de Retention" where aliens are detained before their deportation, this paper explores the role of humor in confinement places. First of all, I will examine the relevance of these matters, trying to understand why this kind of research informs the people's experiences and power relationships in confinement place.

I would like to raise here a set of related questions: what do people laugh for? Why do aliens laugh in retention? To laugh when the situation is not amusing can be perceived as a way of making acceptable the deportation threat, which is lived as unfair and perceived as an injustice. But laugh can also be perceived as a way of subverting the repressive context. I will analyze how humor can be considered as a "weapon of the weak" which permits to impose another perspective and to reverse, at least in a symbolic way, the power games of the retention center. Eventually I would make the hypothesis that humor may be considered an expression (among others) of contributing to political consciousness.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss the embodiment of the condition of “non-belonging” amongst asylum-seekers and refugees in Portugal, from the perspective of medical anthropology. In particular it will focus on how refugees and doctors cope with illness, physical and mental suffering, mental stress disorder, and access to the national system of health.

Paper long abstract:

The CPR is the portuguese NGO that shelters asylum seekers from several countries, and provides juridical, social and economical support, and also provides the link to the national system of health.

The research presented here is based on several interviews with doctors, psychiatrics, nurses, as well as the life stories of refugees (both genders) and details of their medical consultations at the hospital or in health centres.

If the place of residence is stable (the shelter), the residents (asylum seekers) are not, as they only stay there for few months and their experiences are very heterogeneous. In the words of an asylum seeker "the only thing that is common to all of us here is suffering". In this "non-community", several issues, which this presentation will address, relating to physical and mental health, arise:

- How do they access National Health Care?

- Is there any kind of support regarding mental health?

- How does national health system faces health refugees, trauma and stress disorder? Is there any specialized and oriented support?

- How do asylum seekers and refugees express their feelings and their state of health?

- What kind of symptoms do they present?

- Who "listens" the suffering of the trauma?

- How the medical system faces the problem of language between asylum seekers and the doctor?

- Is the "performance" of telling suffering in the border decisive, to get the statute?

In other words: is there in Portugal, any approach regarding the "psychotraumatologie de l'exil" a la Didier Fassin?

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses European refugee camps as an expression of institutional culture of the refugee systems as well as concrete social spaces where particular refugee identities and practices are produced with wider implications for refugees' position in receiving societies.

Paper long abstract:

Refugee camps embody the present European ambivalence towards refugees: are they true suffering subjects of human rights in need of protection or rather threatening needy immigrants who try to abuse the European welfare system? Following Didier Fassin, I conceptualise refugee camps in Europe as materialized combination of policies of order and politics of suffering, oscillation between sentiments control and pity. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Czech Republic between 2004 and 2007, I discuss how the institution of a refugee camp shapes the concept of "a refugee" at a more general level and how it influences actual "being a refugee" through everyday practices of confinement. I argue that, among other things, camps socialise asylum seekers into particular perceptions of law and rules that more or less directly nourish illicit practices. While refugee camps can certainly be perceived as territories of exception (Agamben), they also constitute highly heterogeneous spaces that allow for multiple uses of the refugee label by refugee migrants and various forms of resistance to the system of migration control.

Paper short abstract:

The intersection of different levels of the institution's competences in the urban context concerning the processes of asylum seekers reception and integration. The city of Venice case.

Paper long abstract:

The migration policies in Europe proceed from an integrative and cooperative organization apparatus of border control to shaping differential micro-politics of management and conditional integration.

Locally, the application of European directives overlap, criss-cross and confront the national politics and the practical organization of control by the local government.

In this paper, I wish to interrogate these local articulations of politics on refugees and asylum seekers, based on fieldwork done in the city of Venice (Italy), in a local center dedicated to the temporary reception of asylum seekers.

In particular, I will be considering the intersection of these different levels of the institution's competences in the urban context, which will lead to a better understanding of the local government margin of autonomy concerning these processes of reception and integration.

Through this case study, a more general reflexion on the practical implications of governmental politics, in relation to the political and juridical gap between the right of residence and the right of citizenship in the European democratic system, can be instigated.

Paper short abstract:

On the basis of a fieldwork on alien confinement in the French prison system, this contribution discusses the situation of the researcher who carries out prison ethnography while working for a non-profit organization.

Paper long abstract:

Little research has been carried out on alien confinement in penal institutions. France is no exception despite the fact that as many as 22% of the country’s prison population are non-citizen inmates. Part of the explanation may lie in the practical difficulties researchers often face when they try to gain access to prisons, and those they may meet if they attempt to approach incarcerated non-citizens, who are often among the most isolated and distrustful inmates. For more than three years, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork while providing incarcerated non-citizens with legal counselling and helping them file motions against deportation orders. “Taking a stand” while carrying out fieldwork instead of staying “neutral” or “objective” is often highly criticized in anthropology. In this paper, I will discuss some of the ethical implications of this approach, and its consequences on data-collection.

Maintaining relationships with inmates over months and years allows one to observe their socialization to the prison institution and question the relationship between the lives they led before their incarceration and the resources they are able to mobilize in prison.

Being trusted because one is identified as someone who is “on our side” gives valuable insight into power relations. For instance, while some inmates openly resist against prison discipline or deportation orders, other inmates seem to be model prisoners, as they are both calm and cooperative when they face representatives from the administration and from the penal institution. A relationship built on mutual trust often allows the researcher to see beyond these inmates’ “public transcripts” and observe some of the “hidden transcripts” (Scott: 1985, 1990), such as the trafficking of goods and information, rumours, and gossip. This knowledge, of course, poses certain ethical questions.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the importance of reciprocity cannot be underestimated when one conducts fieldwork among highly marginalized and vulnerable populations. Working for an organization makes it possible to “give something back” to the very individuals whose situations one studies.