On Wednesday, February 12, Mirjam Wajsberg successfully defended her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Moving Edges. Migrant Infrastructuring Practices in Urban Spaces across Europe‘ supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste and dr Joris Schapendonk (click on the title page to download full thesis).
In her thesis, she investigated the various ways in which migrants, amidst legal and socio-economic marginalisation, carve out spaces for mobility and urban attachment. The trajectory of migration and the changing positioning of migrants within this trajectory is not a well-established and clear procedure, as is sometimes supposed by migration policies and policymakers. Migration trajectories come in many different forms and guises. Migration is constituted through a complex network of (power)relations. To be able to constitute adaptive procedures, infrastructures, safe places and supportive relations, knowledge of the way Migrants navigate these complex forces to be able to move from one place to the other and to create or find places to stay is crucial. This PhD thesis, therefore, partially fills this knowledge gap, even though this objective stays rather implicit in this thesis, as is not uncommon for researchers with a historian or ethnographic, and a less critical emancipatory and more descriptive background. Nevertheless, this is the main contribution of this research.
Conceptually Mirjam uses an infrastructuring lens (Cowen, 2017), looking at how specific spaces are constituted by the relational combination of material, technological, social and components. She theorizes these relational practices as suggested by practice theories (O’Reilly, 2012) (see also other entries on practice theories on this blog site). These infrastructures create (urban) spaces for actions, mobilities and attachments to newly gain ‘citizenship’ (Isin, 2008). However, they are not fixed structures, but are ever-changing, by means of changing practices on which they are based. This explains the verb infrastructuring instead of the noun infrastructure providing agency to these migratory practices. These spaces of change can also be described as liminal spaces or edges or as spaces of transition.
Mirjam’s research was heavily affected by the COVID-19 crisis, through which the original trajectory approach in which migrants are closely followed on their trajectory could not be applied. She creatively shifted to the method of conducting a Patchwork Ethnography (Günel, Varma & Watanabe, 2020) allowing a more flexible but not less rigorous ethnographic research.
In her conclusion, Mirjam Wajsberg suggests enriching migration studies and the understanding of the way migrants navigate their migration process with a more dynamic and historically informed perspective.
References
Cowen, D. (2017) Infrastructures of empire and resistance [Blog post]. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance.
Günel, G., Varma, S. & Watanabe, C. (2020) A manifesto for patchwork ethnography [Blog post]. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-manifesto-for-patchwork-ethnography.
Isin, E. (2008) Theorizing acts of citizenship. In: Isin, E. & Nielsen, G. (eds.) Acts of Citzenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London (pp. 15-43).
O’Reilly, K. (2012) Structuration, Practice Theory, Ethnography and Migration
Bringing it all together. Working Paper 61, International Migration Institute (IMI) University of Oxford, Oxford.