Waiting is a particular kind of relation to the world. Keeping people waiting is practicing domin... more Waiting is a particular kind of relation to the world. Keeping people waiting is practicing domination and power. Temporal bordering constitutes an army of reserve labour, whose time is regarded as surplus and wasted and therefore easily exploited. Similar to the case of colonial extraction of natural resources, temporal bordering is nothing other than an act of stealing, stealing of time. WAITING is an experimental film which started from a conversation between a filmmaker and an anthropologist. WAITING explores the theme of waiting through the testimonies of three migrant men in Europe. The testimonies about waiting appear in different forms; letter writing, painting and poetic research. The aim of the film is to integrate academic knowledge into migrant stories and make them accessible to a broader audience by combination of words and images.
a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chr... more a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chronologically in days, weeks, years (or as ancient Greeks put it Chronos) , time is experienced by the migrant herself in terms of quality or lack of quality, in chasing moments of potential opening, or as ancient Greeks called it: kairos. This kairos for Elyas Alavi an Afghanistani-Iranian poet is when grapes ripen and borders get drunk
Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed... more Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed our vision of the inside of the human body. After we started to see inside ourselves, the relationship between ourselves and our bodies changed forever. As a progression in medical science, X-ray technology was fashioned to maintain and save life. However, as the contributors to this volume show, it has been a device of ruination as well. They visualise the traces and the pattern of violence, practised by the states, racial capitalism, colonial racism and sexism. By juxtaposing different cases across time and space, this collection demonstrates a set of relations between civilization and ruination.
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the autho... more The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and f... more Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia - a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race.
Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.
Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, 2020
This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregulari... more This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.
This book analyses post-deportation outcomes and focuses on what happens to migrants and failed a... more This book analyses post-deportation outcomes and focuses on what happens to migrants and failed asylum seekers after deportation. Although there is a growing literature on detention and deportation, academic research on post-deportation is scarce. The book produces knowledge about the consequences of forced removal for deportee's adjustment and " reintegration " in so-called " home " country. As the pattern of migration changes, new research approaches are needed. This book contributes to establish a more multifaceted picture of criminalization of migration and adds novel aspects and approaches, both theoretically and empirically, to the field of migration research.
In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday l... more In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of m... more I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. Accented thinking is a response and a reaction to the condition of coloniality that structures the processes of knowledge production. In this article I aim to explore the potentiality of accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic refusal. I use accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative ways of knowing. I argue that accented thinking can stimulate the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. It takes us beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alternative order.
My short intervention in "Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty"
(edited by Biao X... more My short intervention in "Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty" (edited by Biao Xiang and William Allen)
We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls... more We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls as they are today. Walls are, however, age-old. Empires built walls. And if we look closer, we can see that there are still traces of the old imperial visions in the modern borders and border walls. In this essay I will look at the connections of wars and walls, walls and empires. Through a radical historicisation I will argue that there is a link between the installation of border walls (here) and the unsettling of communities (there). The current border regime is part of a larger and older project of colonial accumulation by dispossession and expulsion; stealing wealth, labour force and time. I will also argue that border crossing discloses the cracks in the dominant narration of borders and that travellers without papers denaturalise what are otherwise naturalised borders, and politicise what are otherwise depoliticised borders. I will illustrate this argument by following travellers without papers along the railways in the Balkans; tracing Afghan deportees in Kabul; and following the social life of the materialities used in the oil sites in Iran and in the wall between Mexico and the USA.
There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a foreigner:
the unforgivable sin of being on this sid... more There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a foreigner: the unforgivable sin of being on this side of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language, name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter how long they have lived in the country, no matter how integrated they are in the society, no matter whether or not they were born in the country. A longterm, sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescriptible: never forgotten; never forgiven.
Abstract The notion of diaspora generally indicates achievements: creating a home outside the hom... more Abstract The notion of diaspora generally indicates achievements: creating a home outside the homeland, entrepreneurship, the establishment of local and global networks, new organisations, media and spatial as well as social mobility. In studies of Iranian diaspora, a rosy picture of 'super successful' Iranians has often obscured other aspects of the diaspora — failure, conflicts, internal exclusion and fragmentation of the group along various lines, such as ideologies, class, gender, local identification and cause of migration. Through ethnographic vignettes of the Iranian migrants in Sweden, this article demonstrates the segmentation, hybridity and complexity of the experiences of the diaspora. Avoiding the language of generalisation and by focussing instead on particular histories and individual circumstances, it reveals the diversity, disintegration and contradictions within what has been assumed to be a homogeneous and static diaspora.
The sociopolitical transition can be observed best in the shift of the symbolic position of work... more The sociopolitical transition can be observed best in the shift of the symbolic position of working-class men: from veneration in the first decade after the revolution to condemnation three decades later.
Waiting is a particular kind of relation to the world. Keeping people waiting is practicing domin... more Waiting is a particular kind of relation to the world. Keeping people waiting is practicing domination and power. Temporal bordering constitutes an army of reserve labour, whose time is regarded as surplus and wasted and therefore easily exploited. Similar to the case of colonial extraction of natural resources, temporal bordering is nothing other than an act of stealing, stealing of time. WAITING is an experimental film which started from a conversation between a filmmaker and an anthropologist. WAITING explores the theme of waiting through the testimonies of three migrant men in Europe. The testimonies about waiting appear in different forms; letter writing, painting and poetic research. The aim of the film is to integrate academic knowledge into migrant stories and make them accessible to a broader audience by combination of words and images.
a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chr... more a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chronologically in days, weeks, years (or as ancient Greeks put it Chronos) , time is experienced by the migrant herself in terms of quality or lack of quality, in chasing moments of potential opening, or as ancient Greeks called it: kairos. This kairos for Elyas Alavi an Afghanistani-Iranian poet is when grapes ripen and borders get drunk
Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed... more Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed our vision of the inside of the human body. After we started to see inside ourselves, the relationship between ourselves and our bodies changed forever. As a progression in medical science, X-ray technology was fashioned to maintain and save life. However, as the contributors to this volume show, it has been a device of ruination as well. They visualise the traces and the pattern of violence, practised by the states, racial capitalism, colonial racism and sexism. By juxtaposing different cases across time and space, this collection demonstrates a set of relations between civilization and ruination.
The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the autho... more The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and f... more Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia - a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race.
Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.
Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration, 2020
This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregulari... more This edited volume approaches waiting both as a social phenomenon that proliferates in irregularised forms of migration and as an analytical perspective on migration processes and practices. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The chapters in this book address legal, bureaucratic, ethical, gendered, and affective dimensions of time and migration. A key concern is to develop more theoretically robust approaches to waiting in migration as constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. The chapters highlight how waiting is configured in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations, as well as how migrants encounter, incorporate, and resist temporal structures. This collection includes ethnographic and other empirically based material, as well as theorizing that cross-cut disciplinary boundaries. It will be relevant to scholars from anthropology and sociology, and others interested in temporalities, migration, borders, and power.
This book analyses post-deportation outcomes and focuses on what happens to migrants and failed a... more This book analyses post-deportation outcomes and focuses on what happens to migrants and failed asylum seekers after deportation. Although there is a growing literature on detention and deportation, academic research on post-deportation is scarce. The book produces knowledge about the consequences of forced removal for deportee's adjustment and " reintegration " in so-called " home " country. As the pattern of migration changes, new research approaches are needed. This book contributes to establish a more multifaceted picture of criminalization of migration and adds novel aspects and approaches, both theoretically and empirically, to the field of migration research.
In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday l... more In Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of m... more I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. Accented thinking is a response and a reaction to the condition of coloniality that structures the processes of knowledge production. In this article I aim to explore the potentiality of accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic refusal. I use accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative ways of knowing. I argue that accented thinking can stimulate the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. It takes us beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alternative order.
My short intervention in "Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty"
(edited by Biao X... more My short intervention in "Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty" (edited by Biao Xiang and William Allen)
We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls... more We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls as they are today. Walls are, however, age-old. Empires built walls. And if we look closer, we can see that there are still traces of the old imperial visions in the modern borders and border walls. In this essay I will look at the connections of wars and walls, walls and empires. Through a radical historicisation I will argue that there is a link between the installation of border walls (here) and the unsettling of communities (there). The current border regime is part of a larger and older project of colonial accumulation by dispossession and expulsion; stealing wealth, labour force and time. I will also argue that border crossing discloses the cracks in the dominant narration of borders and that travellers without papers denaturalise what are otherwise naturalised borders, and politicise what are otherwise depoliticised borders. I will illustrate this argument by following travellers without papers along the railways in the Balkans; tracing Afghan deportees in Kabul; and following the social life of the materialities used in the oil sites in Iran and in the wall between Mexico and the USA.
There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a foreigner:
the unforgivable sin of being on this sid... more There is a fundamental sinfulness in being a foreigner: the unforgivable sin of being on this side of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language, name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter how long they have lived in the country, no matter how integrated they are in the society, no matter whether or not they were born in the country. A longterm, sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescriptible: never forgotten; never forgiven.
Abstract The notion of diaspora generally indicates achievements: creating a home outside the hom... more Abstract The notion of diaspora generally indicates achievements: creating a home outside the homeland, entrepreneurship, the establishment of local and global networks, new organisations, media and spatial as well as social mobility. In studies of Iranian diaspora, a rosy picture of 'super successful' Iranians has often obscured other aspects of the diaspora — failure, conflicts, internal exclusion and fragmentation of the group along various lines, such as ideologies, class, gender, local identification and cause of migration. Through ethnographic vignettes of the Iranian migrants in Sweden, this article demonstrates the segmentation, hybridity and complexity of the experiences of the diaspora. Avoiding the language of generalisation and by focussing instead on particular histories and individual circumstances, it reveals the diversity, disintegration and contradictions within what has been assumed to be a homogeneous and static diaspora.
The sociopolitical transition can be observed best in the shift of the symbolic position of work... more The sociopolitical transition can be observed best in the shift of the symbolic position of working-class men: from veneration in the first decade after the revolution to condemnation three decades later.
This article contains the text and discussion of a debate held at the IUAES World Congress in Ant... more This article contains the text and discussion of a debate held at the IUAES World Congress in Anthropology at Manchester University in 2013. The motion was proposed by Bela Feldman-Bianco (State University of Campinas), seconded by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven) and was opposed by Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), seconded by Nicholas de Genova (then at Goldsmiths’ College). The debate was chaired by Simone Abram (Durham University).
Borders of nation-states have come to be a natural order in human lives. They are not only edges ... more Borders of nation-states have come to be a natural order in human lives. They are not only edges of a state but also seen as an essential reference of national identity. Based on a capitalist-oriented and racial discriminating way of thinking, borders regulate movements of people. In an era of global inequality of mobility rights, freedom of mobility for some is only possible through systematic exclusion of others. This paper is an auto-ethnography of borders and ‘illegal’ travelling. Based on personal experiences of a long journey across many borders in Asia and Europe, I attempt to explore how the contemporary border regime operates. The paper focuses on the rituals and performances of border crossing. This is a narrative of the late 20th century through the eyes of an ‘illegal’ migrant.
Whoops! An error has occurred. We are experiencing difficulty with your request. If you continue ... more Whoops! An error has occurred. We are experiencing difficulty with your request. If you continue to experience the same problem, please contact us. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and will do everything we can to resolve the problem. ...
Breathe - Critical Research into the Inequalities of Life. Edited by Sandra Noeth, Janez Jansa, 2023
Breathing has become a political urgency that reveals unequal distributions of life chanc... more Breathing has become a political urgency that reveals unequal distributions of life chances organized through a convergence of race and class. The fact that breathing has become a differentially distributed right, makes breathing a political issue. Following several traces of breathlessness across time and space I want to illuminate the political vulnerabilities of certain bodies. The concept of stolen breaths brings together various forms of the—slow or quick—violence, that individuals or groups are exposed to
Infrastructural Love Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems. Edited by: Hélène Frichot, Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm and Sepideh Karami, 2022
Handbook on the Governance and Politics of Migration . Edited by Emma Carmel, Katharina Lenner and Regine Paul, 2021
The modern form of removal that we call deportation is unique to the modern nation-state system. ... more The modern form of removal that we call deportation is unique to the modern nation-state system. Critical inquiry into the processes of deportation is indispensable yet requires careful ethical and methodological considerations. In this chapter we will provide an overview of critical scholarly perspectives on the politics, practices and experiences of deportation. It suggests that we study deportation not as a discrete event but as a process, intertwined with other global processes that produce and sustain inequalities, exclusion and marginalization. We investigate how the condition of protracted, multiple and ceaseless abandonment before, during and after deportation constitutes normality in the daily lives of deportees. Studying deportation as a non-linear, multi-sited and often contradictory process contributes to further knowledge on how deportation is related to broader processes of social exclusion and marginalization.
In 'Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration'
Edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marr... more In 'Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration'
Edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, Shahram Khosravi
Auto-ethnography is a writing style with personal experiences interjected into ethnographic writi... more Auto-ethnography is a writing style with personal experiences interjected into ethnographic writing. As a form of self-narrative, auto-ethnography places the self within a social context. An interesting aspect of this genre is that the distinction between ethnographer and others becomes blurred. Auto-ethnography links the world of the author with the world of others. The main aim of my auto-ethnographies has been to link, to connect, human experiences. My stories gain their narrative power from the spaces in between these experiences. This linking and communicability of experiences is the core strength of auto-ethnography. Based on my own experiences as migrant, anthropologist and public intellectual, in this chapter I will explore what emerges from the space in between.
The film then continues with video clips of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ showing drowning migra... more The film then continues with video clips of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ showing drowning migrants in the Mediterranean Sea or migrants stuck at barbed wire borders along the Balkans in 2015. Rather than a crisis, it was, in the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot’s term, a disaster. Recurrent reference to ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ as an embodiment of fear, pain, and despair force the viewers to ask: 'how can we respond to the disaster?’ Blanchot argued of the impossibility of the representation of the disaster. We cannot fully comprehend, and therefore we are not able to represent a disaster since we are not able to see the whole catastrophe, the full scale of what has happened.
Deportation to Afghanistan is politically irresponsible, ethically incorrect, and financially ill... more Deportation to Afghanistan is politically irresponsible, ethically incorrect, and financially illogical.
Paper trails: migrants, documents, and legal insecurity
edited by Sarah B. Horton and Josiah Heym... more Paper trails: migrants, documents, and legal insecurity edited by Sarah B. Horton and Josiah Heyman, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2020
While borders of different kinds seem to be everywhere, yet some borders are more visible than ot... more While borders of different kinds seem to be everywhere, yet some borders are more visible than others due to their design; some perform heavier than others due to their distinctive material qualities; some are more lethal than others because of the way they perform; some borders operate not only to repress but to produce different sorts of subject, wealth and capital and they do so due to their specific design and materiality.
In recent years, an emerging movement in social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, is taking place which calls for a greater attention towards objects, materials, infrastructures and their performative, spatial and temporal qualities that recognise and consequently generate a different form of politics. Similarly, scholars of migration and border studies have payed attention to the performativity and materiality of borders for instance through discussing technologically and materially designed apparatuses regulating mobility and migration.
Following such emergence, this experimental course by weaving two modes of inquiry aims to provide a space for thinking and discussing as well as intervening in how the materiality and performativity of borders operate and what they produce through their designs in different sites and moments. Building on recent scholarship in anthropology of borders and design anthropology, this course aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice through multi-modal learning.
In this course, on the one hand, students will read the texts in which scholars and practitioners examine the materiality and performativity of borders in contemporary time. On the other hand, the course by engaging design methods of inquiry such as mapping, visualisation, prototyping, probing, etc. will include practice and project based explorations of borders in different contexts introduced to the class through lectures and seminars. Possible contexts for project could include but not limited to borders in urban spaces operating through logistics and infrastructures, gentrification processes, integration discourses and practices; geopolitical and historical borders operating through off shore visa policies, European border regime, colonial borders and demarcations, development and humanitarian work as well as borders in and by technological configurations such as algorithms, biometrics, surveillance, big data, drones, social media, etc.
The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the anthropology of objects, sites and spaces as borders and bordering processes through implying different ethnographic as well as design concepts and methods.
The course was held during Fall 2017 as part of Engaging Vulnerability Program at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Back to square one again: The intensification of smuggling across Iranian borders
https://www.the... more Back to square one again: The intensification of smuggling across Iranian borders https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_11552153
a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chr... more a visual reflection on bordering practices. While the authorities measure a migrant’s waiting chronologically in days, weeks, years (or as ancient Greeks put it Chronos) , time is experienced by the migrant herself in terms of quality or lack of quality, in chasing moments of potential opening, or as ancient Greeks called it: kairos. This kairos for Elyas Alavi an Afghanistani-Iranian poet is when grapes ripen and borders get drunk
Made by Shahram Khosravi and Behzad Khosravi-Noori
The Foreigner’s Home is a compelling and poetic film that explores two central concepts in Toni M... more The Foreigner’s Home is a compelling and poetic film that explores two central concepts in Toni Morrison’s work; the foreigner and the home. The film starts with footage from 2006 when Ms. Morrison was invited by the Louvre in Paris to curate an exhibition. With the same title, The Foreigner's Home, Ms. Morrison decided to put the focus of the exhibition on the pain of exile and displacement. Engaging footage of the exhibition, intertwining with Ms. Morrison’s words, and animations, the film eloquently poses fundamental questions of our time: Who is the foreigner? How long does a foreigner remain a foreigner? Who decides what the foreignness is in a person? What, rather than where, is a home? What is the relationship between houselessness (lacking lodging) and homelessness (existential or politically imposed unbelonging)? Throughout the film Toni Morrison’s words and visions engage us into a conversation which is vital to understanding: ‘what does it mean to be human?
Detta kapitel handlar a ena sidan om manniskor som uppehaller sig i Sverige utan tillstand och a ... more Detta kapitel handlar a ena sidan om manniskor som uppehaller sig i Sverige utan tillstand och a andra sidan om socialtjanstens, skolans, sjukvardens med fleras uppdrag och ansvar. Som papekas i Inledningen saknas det nastan helt sakra data om denna grupp. I avsaknad av registerdata och enkatundersokningar hanvisas man darfor till den begransade forskningen som existerar, mindre undersokningar, fallbeskrivningar och intervjuer som finns att tillga. De flesta undersokningar grundas pa uppgifter fran dem som har sokt hjalp daremot finns det mycket begransad information om den grupp vars halsotillstand kanske ar mindre problematiskt. Kapitlet behandlar aven de oforenligheter som kan uppsta mellan olika politikomraden (migrationspolitik kontra social-, halsovards- och sjukvards- samt utbildningspolitik) nar manniskor befinner sig i Sverige utan lagligt stod. Dessutom har staten aven krav pa sig att uppfylla och respektera de manskliga rattigheter som omfattas av de internationella konventioner som Sverige har ratificerat.
On politics and precarity in academia
David Loher (ed)
Sabine Strasser (ed)
Daniel Monterescu
Esr... more On politics and precarity in academia David Loher (ed) Sabine Strasser (ed) Daniel Monterescu Esra Dabağcı Ester Gallo Cris Shore Akhil Gupta Chandana Mathur Lorena Anton Rodica Zane Annika Lems Shahram Khosravi Zeynep Sarıaslan Noel B. Salazar Ainhoa Montoya Marta Pérez Uroš Kovač Alice Tilche Giacomo Loperfido Patricia Matos Kiri Santer Eli
Loher, D., Strasser, S., Monterescu, D., Dabağcı, E., Gallo, E., Shore, C., Gupta, A., Mathur, C., Anton, L., Zane, R., Lems, A., Khosravi, S., Sarıaslan, Z., Salazar, N.B., Montoya, A., Pérez, M., Kovač, U., Tilche, A., Loperfido, G., Matos, P., Santer, K. and Thorkelson, E. (2019), On politics and precarity in academia. Soc Anthropol, 27: 97-117. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12695
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WAITING is an experimental film which started from a conversation between a filmmaker and an anthropologist. WAITING explores the theme of waiting through the testimonies of three migrant men in Europe. The testimonies about waiting appear in different forms; letter writing, painting and poetic research. The aim of the film is to integrate academic knowledge into migrant stories and make them accessible to a broader audience by combination of words and images.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.
Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
(edited by Biao Xiang and William Allen)
the unforgivable sin of being on this side
of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language,
name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones
who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter
how long they have lived in the country, no matter
how integrated they are in the society, no matter
whether or not they were born in the country. A longterm,
sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees
discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescriptible:
never forgotten; never forgiven.
WAITING is an experimental film which started from a conversation between a filmmaker and an anthropologist. WAITING explores the theme of waiting through the testimonies of three migrant men in Europe. The testimonies about waiting appear in different forms; letter writing, painting and poetic research. The aim of the film is to integrate academic knowledge into migrant stories and make them accessible to a broader audience by combination of words and images.
By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.
Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.
Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.
Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.
(edited by Biao Xiang and William Allen)
the unforgivable sin of being on this side
of the border with a ‘foreign’ skin colour, language,
name, face or religion. Foreigners are undesired ones
who never stop being seen as foreigners, no matter
how long they have lived in the country, no matter
how integrated they are in the society, no matter
whether or not they were born in the country. A longterm,
sometimes lifelong, re-entry ban for deportees
discloses the fact that foreigners’ sins are imprescriptible:
never forgotten; never forgiven.
(then at Goldsmiths’ College). The debate was chaired by Simone Abram
(Durham University).
Edited by Christine M. Jacobsen, Marry-Anne Karlsen, Shahram Khosravi
(open access)
disaster. Recurrent reference to ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ as an embodiment of fear, pain, and despair force the viewers to ask: 'how can we respond to the disaster?’ Blanchot argued of the impossibility of the representation of the disaster. We cannot fully comprehend, and therefore
we are not able to represent a disaster since we are not able to see the whole catastrophe, the full scale of what has happened.
edited by Sarah B. Horton and Josiah Heyman, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2020
In recent years, an emerging movement in social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, is taking place which calls for a greater attention towards objects, materials, infrastructures and their performative, spatial and temporal qualities that recognise and consequently generate a different form of politics. Similarly, scholars of migration and border studies have payed attention to the performativity and materiality of borders for instance through discussing technologically and materially designed apparatuses regulating mobility and migration.
Following such emergence, this experimental course by weaving two modes of inquiry aims to provide a space for thinking and discussing as well as intervening in how the materiality and performativity of borders operate and what they produce through their designs in different sites and moments. Building on recent scholarship in anthropology of borders and design anthropology, this course aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice through multi-modal learning.
In this course, on the one hand, students will read the texts in which scholars and practitioners examine the materiality and performativity of borders in contemporary time. On the other hand, the course by engaging design methods of inquiry such as mapping, visualisation, prototyping, probing, etc. will include practice and project based explorations of borders in different contexts introduced to the class through lectures and seminars. Possible contexts for project could include but not limited to borders in urban spaces operating through logistics and infrastructures, gentrification processes, integration discourses and practices; geopolitical and historical borders operating through off shore visa policies, European border regime, colonial borders and demarcations, development and humanitarian work as well as borders in and by technological configurations such as algorithms, biometrics, surveillance, big data, drones, social media, etc.
The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the anthropology of objects, sites and spaces as borders and bordering processes through implying different ethnographic as well as design concepts and methods.
The course was held during Fall 2017 as part of Engaging Vulnerability Program at Uppsala University, Sweden.
https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_11552153
Made by Shahram Khosravi and Behzad Khosravi-Noori
David Loher (ed)
Sabine Strasser (ed)
Daniel Monterescu
Esra Dabağcı
Ester Gallo
Cris Shore
Akhil Gupta
Chandana Mathur
Lorena Anton
Rodica Zane
Annika Lems
Shahram Khosravi
Zeynep Sarıaslan
Noel B. Salazar
Ainhoa Montoya
Marta Pérez
Uroš Kovač
Alice Tilche
Giacomo Loperfido
Patricia Matos
Kiri Santer
Eli
Loher, D., Strasser, S., Monterescu, D., Dabağcı, E., Gallo, E., Shore, C., Gupta, A., Mathur, C., Anton, L., Zane, R., Lems, A., Khosravi, S., Sarıaslan, Z., Salazar, N.B., Montoya, A., Pérez, M., Kovač, U., Tilche, A., Loperfido, G., Matos, P., Santer, K. and Thorkelson, E. (2019), On politics and precarity in academia. Soc Anthropol, 27: 97-117. doi:10.1111/1469-8676.12695