The Centre Cannot Hold: Arrival, Margins, and the Politics of Ambivalence

Keywords: Migration, Urbanisation,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

Migration scholarship rests on a foundational, conceptual divide between centers and margins. Applied across scales, this dichotomy categorises and contrasts those holding political membership and rights with outsiders not yet part of the geographically bound social, economic or political community in question. Within this rubric, marginal spaces and marginal lives are framed by the centre. It takes the centre for granted as something that is defined, acts coherently, and mobilises to shape its future. Carefully considering how people move across varied social, geographic, and political borders to make new lives gives us cause to question the centre’s primacy in defining the margins and the very notion of a reified, identified centre. This paper seeks to unsettle the margin: to approach them as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained migration flows. Margins, in other words, are more than less residual categories on the edges of a politics defined by the centre. They are instead sites of contestation, membership claiming, identity formation, and boundary production. They are places where political and institutional practices defining centre and periphery are taken up, adapted, recast, and reinvented; where new margins are drawn, sometimes creating spaces of exclusion and incorporation within the periphery. They are also places of emergent solidarities. They are where the politics of the future is being shaped and there is acute need to develop the empirical and epistemological tools to examine how boundaries and margins engage with migration processes on their own terms.