Welcome to the migration seminar!

Becoming the Road: Migrant-Made Infrastructures and the Corridor of Violent Transit

Speakers

  • Martin Bak Jørgensen, Professor in Processes of Migration at DEMOS at the Department for Culture and Learning, Aalborg University
  • Mashudu Salifu, PhD Fellow at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University and a member of the DEMOS research group
  • Tomislav Pušić, PhD Fellow at Aalborg University’s Doctoral School of Social Sciences and Humanities and a member of the DEMOS research group

Abstract

Najeeb, a Sudanese survivor, described his two-year journey from Darfur to the Canary Islands as “a corridor of exhaustion and abandonment.” He endured hunger, imprisonment, and violence across Chad, Niger, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco, making 39 failed attempts to cross Ceuta and Melilla before boarding a small boat to El Hierro. “Deportation,” he said, “is not a solution. It resets the suffering. For many, the sea is the only door left open.”

This article conceptualizes such routes as Corridors of Violent Transit—recursive geographies of attrition where border regimes delay, deplete, and erase rather than reject or accept. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in the Canary Islands and the Bosnia and Herzegovina–Croatia corridor, and migrant testimonies, it traces infrastructures of death—pushbacks, imprisonment, bureaucratic suspension—and infrastructures of life migrants create: shared SIM cards, WhatsApp networks, rotating shelters, and boats without captains.

The study advances three arguments:

  1. necropolitics extends to mobile exposure to death;
  2. infrastructures include migrant-made systems of endurance;
  3. migration reflects racialized global apartheid. Ultimately, migrants refuse disappearance, transforming spaces of death into infrastructures of life—inscribing humanity into geographies built to erase it.

Attendance

This is a hybrid seminar, you are welcome to connect via Zoom or join us at MIM seminar room, floor 9, Niagara, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1. To attend on campus, please gather by the reception area at 13.05.
If you have any questions, send an email mim@mau.se

Zoom

Will be available closer to the seminar date.

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