CALL FOR PAPERS. Station 5. De-borderlands: naming, gendering, and infrastructuring freedom of movement
CALL FOR PAPERS (Deadline for submission: July 30)
The ERC SOLROUTES project invites contributions to its 2025 Intermediate Conference with a view to critically rethinking the multifaceted nexus between solidarity and unauthorized migration.
This discussion will take place along three interrelated analytical axes: emic languages and naming, gendered solidarities, and (counter)infrastructural processes enacting freedom of movement.
In recent decades, academic research on migration has increasingly moved beyond methodological nationalism. Within this shift, solidarity has emerged as both a normative ideal and an empirical object, animated by various actors – namely, migrants, activists, kinship networks, grassroots movements, and NGOs – operating across different terrains, sites and scales. However, solidarity is far from a stable or universal category; rather, it is a contested and dynamic field of social action and meaning, deeply embedded in languages, gendered social relations, and cultural, social, and material infrastructures. We suggested to conceive solidarity through the lens of a materialistic approach: during almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork across North and Western Africa, the Balkans and Mediterranean areas, SOLROUTES researchers have tried to explore how solidarity as a circulating energy opens routes and de-bordering opportunities, facing harshening constraints of border policies and technologies.
The present conference has been convened in response to the necessity for a plural and situated theorisation of solidarity, grounded in the lived experiences of those who inhabit, resist, and navigate migration routes. Furthermore, the aim is to present intermediate outcomes of the project entering in a theoretical and methodological conversation with colleagues and scholars working on similar topics. The Conference will be opened by Luca Queirolo Palmas (University of Genoa, SOLROUTES P.I.) and Federico Rahola (University of Genoa). Keynote-speaker: Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna).
CONTRIBUTORS ARE INVITED TO CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING AXES FOR THEIR PROPOSAL:
- Naming and Grounding Solidarity
- Gendering Solidarity
- Infrastructuring Solidarity
Read more information: CallForPapers_Station5.pdf
