What Comes to Matter as Border: On Parisian Borderness Dynamics

Even though it is now established within the field of border studies that bordering experiences vary depending on who you are, a less investigated problem has to do with how differentially border-ed/ing realities and knowledges relate, emerge, and matter. Therefore, this paper unpacks, in dialog with feminist sciences studies, what Sarah Green calls “borderness dynamics” as a cosmos-politics, a complicating ecology of situated knowledges on and of border(ing)s. The argument builds on an ethnographic investigation of the processes through which initially "borderless"” White European volunteers from pro-refugee initiatives in Paris come to sense and know borders in the city as they encounter other border-ed/ing versions of Paris through their practices. The paper demonstrates how these shifts in volunteers’ border sensibilities and knowledges matter ethically and ontologically. The shifts in their (not)knowing/sensing, animated by processes of complication, multiplication, and texturization, contribute to re-shaping what comes to matter as border, as well as to de-re-territorializing the city and its inhabitants as a borderland and as borderlanders. Attending to borderness dynamics enables one to map encounter-induced positionality changes that contribute to “rescaping” at once borders, borderlands, and borderlanders

Good Trouble : Moral Crises and Ethical Experimentations

peer reviewedThis chapter examines crises as politico-ethical moments of vulnerability that lead to transformation and experimentation with dominant norms and ways of doing and valuing the good. It explores mundane forms of ethical crises defined as 'moral breakdowns' in the context of grassroots welcome practices for refugees in Paris. It demonstrates that, in this context, everyday crises about what doing good is and how it should be done can be understood as both an expression and a response to a broader crisis of EUrope and its borders

WELCOME CULTURES AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF B/ORDERING

peer reviewedIn this paper, we explore how borders and associated processes-spatial othering and orderingare reproduced, resisted and undermined temporally. To do so, we investigate ethnographically how 'welcomers' from volunteer pro-refugee initiatives in Paris become involved in the chronopolitics of b/ordering. Our empirical analysis builds on the practice turn in border studies and on Sharma's chronography of power, which focuses on the relational dimension of temporal politics. We detail three temporal practices of Parisian welcome cultures: temporal translation, temporal creation and the elaboration of sub-architectures of temporal maintenance. In detailing these practices ethnographically, we highlight the ambiguity of welcomers' role in the chronopolitics of b/ordering: aligning with and recalibrating refugees' bodies to the rhythmic and temporal logics of b/ordering as well as undermining the violence, binarity and rigidified identities underpinning b/ordering timelines

Sensing, imagining, doing Europe: Europeanisation in the boundary work of welcome cultures

In the article, we shed light on and problematize the everyday sensing, imagining, and doing of Europe in the boundary work of welcome cul-tures. By relating the practices and performances of the welcome cultures to a long tradition of thought problematizing European identity around the notion of cosmopolitanism, we read welcoming activities as openings for imagining and doing an inclusive Europe in a space apart from and beyond the institutional violence of exclusive borders. It is our argument that through the everyday activities of welcoming, ‘other Europes’ emerge, heterotopia, materialized as ‘elsewheres’ articulated in resistance to and as well as mirroring and mimicking the EU and state bordering. We thereby illuminate how European welcome cultures open for renegotiat-ing and reimagining the boundaries and contours of what it means to be European, and this is sensed, imagined and performed in the everyday practices