La Mer Mortelle

Een tweedaagse conferentie vol workshops en debat over “the Irregularization of Migration” – deportation, detention, drowning in la Mer Mortelle.

‘Borders have guards and the guards have guns’ is the opening phrase of a famous article by moral philosopher Joseph Carens pleading for open borders in 1987. Borders did not open. Instead, borders are no longer at the border, Étienne Balibar argued in 1998, and since several years, the border is everywhere.
With this workshop we seek to address the cultural, political and
normative dimensions of three concurrent developments: the transformation of our understanding of borders, the progressive irregularization of migration in the EU, and the increasingly violent policies and practices at the EU’s borders. The irregularization of migration and the increase of border policing constitute a process parallel to the free flow of commodities and money in a globalized economy: the smoothening of mercantile space goes hand in hand with, and indeed seems to advance, an ever more complex stratification of geographical space and a dismantling of rights, personhood and political agency. The workshop addresses this often neglected dimension of globalization.

22 en 23 februari aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam, VOC-Zaal, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam. Meer info via mermortelle.org.