| 1. |
- Wagner Tsoni, Ioanna
(author)
-
Affective Borderscapes : Constructing, Enacting and Contesting Borders across the Southeastern Mediterranean
- 2019
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In the wake of a sociopolitically volatile era, which is increasingly characterized by the intensive and extensive proliferation of borders, the management of borders and migration are considered as predominantly rational and dispassionate processes. Their functions and filtering mechanisms, however, are increasingly underpinned by the instrumental top-down exertion of affective power and by the cultivation of emotional dispositions among political communities. At the same time, compliance to- or contestation of these forces also manifests ‘from below’ through transgressive patterns of human mobilities and mobilisations around borders, which are similarly affectively-driven. This Ph.D. dissertation examines the impact of various actors’ affective practices on the construction, enactment and contestation of affective borderscapes in the southeastern Mediterrane-an and its Aegean appendix, and explores how those processes manifest and link up at multiple scales across space and time from a perspective that accounts for the affective dimensions of border regimes aside from their legal, infrastructural and political causes and consequences. Through long-term ethnographic engagement with communities and individuals that have been passing through or inhabiting several locations along the much-fraught Aegean borders in times of major socioeconomic and geopolitical upheaval, this thesis formulates and puts forth the concept of affective borderscapes. They are liminal, overlapping landscapes that function as contact zones and as charged fields of affective interaction between assemblages of animate and inanimate actors. As an original contribution to border and migration studies, this concept bears great potential for the acquisition and mobilisation of knowledge, as well as for the design and application of human-centered policy and practice.
|
|
| 2. |
- Wagner Tsoni, Ioanna
(author)
-
Parsing the Aegean affective borderscape
- 2019
-
In: Journal of Narrative Politics. - : University of York. ; 6:1, s. 4-21
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The land- and sea-scape stretching across the Greek-Turkish borders in the Aegean Sea had diachronically been a space where cultures, authorities and mobilities have interlocked and reciprocally reshaped. The advent of the European crisis of refugee reception and asylum since 2015, however, has turned the southeastern Mediterranean into a securitized zone lacerated by disquiet and death, irreversibly affecting the local topography and recasting the sociality and mobility of permanent and itinerant communities in the region. Seeking to contribute to the theoretical and analytical understanding of borders and their effects on the sociospatial landscapes they cut across, this essay offers a narrative analysis of the Aegean borderscape. This is done through the detailed parsing of a photograph depicting an inconspicuous moment of bordering, supplemented with the author’s own experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations in Lesvos. The unravelling of the manifold storylines interlocked within the still image that is the focal point of this essay reveals the borderscape’s materialities, its local and historical specificities, its affective intensities and the uneven power dynamics at play between a variety of actors encountering each other at the border.
|
|
| 3. |
- Wagner Tsoni, Ioanna
(author)
-
Trash/Traces : Lives adrift along the border
- 2020
-
In: K[]NESH [on the politics of space & cultural interventions]. - : Konesh. ; :2
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper expands on the visual essay ‘Trash/Traces: Lives adrift along the border’, which narrates the author’s experiences at the frontline of refugee rescue operations during the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’ and explores the Aegean borderscape’s affective geography by tracking the human and material traces of undocumented border-crossings on Lesvos island. Drawing on humanities’ turn to affect and new materialism, and theoretical advancements in border studies this twofold project implements visual and (auto)ethnographic methods to indicate obscured dimensions of the contemporary European border regime and illustrate the affective and somatic impact of its politics upon a variety of actors. This is done through the visual and narrative chronicling of bordercrossing humans and materials, which are regarded and handled as trash to be promptly removed from public view, through their irregular trajectories’ narration by the seawashed personal items. An archaeogeography of undocumented migration emerges through the tracing, conservation, and articulation of the flows of human and material ‘waste’ and their intersections and layerings across liminal landscapes, thereby instigating a rethinking of the affective, bodily and material economies of emplacement and mobility across the Eastern Mediterranean.
|
|
