Territorial ironies : deservingness as a struggle for migrant legitimacy in Belgium

This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants’ narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state responds to undocumented migrants by enforcing and implementing citizenship policies that persistently keep them on the fringes of legitimacy and recognition. The discursive constructions of ‘good citizens’ that undocumented migrants embody and make claims to in Belgium extend to and envelop the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe in general

Climate Matters to Western Sydney: Everyday Sustainability Practices in Uncertain Times 2023

This report shows how residents of Western Sydney practice environmental sustainability in their everyday lives and aspire for concrete climate action. It documents the responses of 100 households in the LGAs of Parramatta, Blacktown, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland, Camden, Blue Mountains, Hills Shire, Penrith, Liverpool, and Strathfield. Our respondents comprised a cross-section of age, genders, and ethnic groups including those who identify as Australians from white, culturally diverse, and mixed racial backgrounds

Sounds of trauma

This article explores the sounds of trauma in anthropology. I ask: when, where, and under what circumstances do unmoored sounds and voices gain salience in anthropology? In particular, can methodological insights prepare anthropologists for the intense military scrutiny that societies endure in violent borderlands? Recalling the long tradition of orality in anthropology, I suggest that the slippery registers of sound and voice in trauma is generative not only of location and culture, but also of a perennial sense of dislocation. Writing anthropology demands the iterative re-dwelling and reliving of sound and voice that continually haunt, emerge, flow, and resurface across different stages of ethnographic labour. Disembodied sounds and voices generate indescribable languages. Based on my long term ethnographic fieldwork in the Northeast India-Bangladesh borderlands, I show how sensory modalities not only nourish divergent possibilities of meaning and emplacement but also register impasses of interpretation and displacement

Life Cycle

Life Cycle (42 Minutes) explores the place of the bicycle in the everyday lives of city dwellers in Kolkata. Are Kolkata's bicycles relics of a past to be hastily discarded or are they viable, if complicated cargo vehicles in India’s burgeoning cities? Winding through Kolkata’s roads we follow the city’s daily wage-workers, teachers and environmentalists and their changing relationships to cycling. What happens when new traffic regulations impede two-wheeled travelers from riding on Kolkata’s roads? How do vendors, couriers, newspaper sellers and artists negotiate Kolkata’s roads congested with cars and other motorized transport? Who wins the battle for the road – the bicycle or the car? Life Cycle is a tribute to the bicycle in uncertain times; and its relationship to rapidly changing Indian cities. Direction: Malini Sur

Registers of imprecision

The violence in Kokrajhar, Assam, its recurrence in the Bodo autonomous regions and other areas of lower Assam, and its tangible markers (the numbers of the dead, wounded and displaced) cause alarm. As new statistics surface, humanitarian intervention speeds up. Those supporting the autonomy of the Bodos and their displacement, the cause of the Muslims of Bengali origin and “Bangladeshi” immigrants, and those concerned about Assam’s predicament within India and along its borders with Bangladesh — everyone demands precise explanations. Who arrived when in these areas? Who displaced whom? Who killed? Who watched and witnessed? Who incited? Who fled? Facilitating reconciliatory dialogues, many observers indicate, is especially critical

People without papers

A few years ago, I stood spellbound on the streets of Brussels. It was a carnival. With Ecuadorian dancers and to the beats of Ghanaian drummers, 15 thousand men, women and children were marching. Everyone held placards that scripted demands for rights to “People Without Papers”. Having arrived in Europe from various parts of the world, the protesters were newcomers and their supporters. The police kept a close watch. A series of cleaning vans followed us till the protest ended at a prominent European institution in Brussels

Asia's gendered borderlands

This chapter explores the intersections between gender, nationalisms, and borders in Asia. Advancing that a gendered lens offers critical insights into the production of borderlands as partitioned and sexualized territories, it invites scholars of borders to rethink women’s roles in armed struggles and resettlement projects. The manner in which women’s political and economic participation in nation building have redefined gendered relations and the ways in which women mobilize, circumvent, and challenge dominant gender hierarchies through their participation transborder trade and wage labour, is illuminated. Finally, the chapter reviews how women’s abilities to cross borders and take risks for foreign domestic work occur through gendered pathways, and query geographical scale

Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border

Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration.

Ambient air : Kolkata's bicycle politics and postcarbon futures

On November 1, 2018, Kolkata registered its cleanest air in recent years. A cyclone had miraculously cleared the city of its air pollutants. With the clarity of the ambient air, Kolkata’s emergent high-rise skyline appeared prominently in news reports about the air quality. The clean air did not last long. By the end of the month, Kolkata’s air quality had dipped dramatically. One day after the Hindu festivals of Kali Puja and Diwali, when city dwellers reveled in lighting fireworks on the streets, the city registered the worst air in metropolitan India

Indelible lines : revisiting borders and partitions in modern South Asia

In the foggy winter of February 2003, when 213 snake charmers and healers—who were stranded for several days at the India-Bangladesh border—mysteriously disappeared, speculations about their national identities led to acrimonious debates between India and Bangladesh. States of limbo and invisibility are a recurring motif along this militarized border, as India physically 'pushes out' suspected 'illegal' Bangladeshis and Bangladesh prevents the entry of 'illegal foreigners.' Although India’s new border fence with Bangladesh increasingly encloses this 4,096 kilometer (2,545 miles) boundary, border residents and others regularly travel without passports