Through aeknowledging migration as an embodied and gendered phenomenon, I prohlematise contemporary discourse on the migration of the highly skilled. With a focus on highly educated migrant Maghrebi women's life stories, 1 analyse the labour-market strategies of the women concerned and reflect these in light of macronarratives of skilled migration. I argue that the concept of intersectionality, which centres on the variety of axes of demarcation, is useñil in understanding agency as conditioned hy a variety of forces playing upon the individual hoth in enabling and in constraining ways. Paying attention to the life course via intersectionality is also helpñil in understanding hetter the experiences of the (partially) privileged, and is necessary in order to avoid reproducing dominant representations of migrant women in positions of passivity and victimisation.

This paper adopts an ontological perspective toward asylum interviews. The suggested take refers to the incompatibility of different knowledge systems and experienced worlds between asylum seekers and asylum officers. With such a focus, we sketch the parallel functioning of knowledge‐claims anchored in two radically different ontological principles. Our analysis starts with the body as a site and source of knowledge through which we critically examine the limits of knowledge sought after in asylum politics. The ontological gap reflects the divide between meaning and significance, self and other, which this paper seeks to mediate through feminist methodologies and ethnographic insight. We suggest that asylum seekers do fill the ontological gap, but not in ways anticipated by governmental practices; their bodies and stories adopt alternative ways of identification and taking action. Thus, the gap is an opening for conceiving different knowledges and knowledge practices within asylum politics and international relations.

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress.

Analyses of political agency often take the Habermasian notion of an ideal speech situation and its related discourse ethics as the ultimate model of politically relevant communication. Our examination of Finnish asylum officers’ perspectives on their work leads us to consider the asylum interview as an event of the political, an event of the body politic. Our interest lies in acts of communication that go beyond speech, which necessitates an engagement with the corporeal element of communication. Based on our data, we show how a focus on spoken communication alone fails to capture manifold ways in which the encounter between asylum officers and asylum applicant produces the political. We argue that taking corporeality seriously would enhance our understanding of what is at stake in this encounter and also beyond it.

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