Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos' co-authored book, Migrant Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City, blends fieldwork in Istanbul, Athens, and Nicosia with theoretical discussion of capitalism, digitalities, and the right to the city. The book works with what it calls a multiple southern perspective, referring to its desire to work with migrants to understand how cities take shape, and to draw on feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theory. It also points to the gap which often opens between theory and praxis, and through its engagement with Istanbul, Athens, and Nicosia, attempts to, in the words of the authors "take a theoretical step forward by thinking beyond the narrow confines of antitheoretical empiricism without however losing track of its grounding in social reality and social action" (Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, & Tsianos, 2015, p. 13). The book covers an impressive range of contemporary critical theory and major debates in the broad field of critical migration and border studies. The first chapter sets out a theoretical overview, moving through a range of debates across the field, touching upon critical discussions around citizenship, autonomy of migration scholarship, bordering, and the production of space. The proposal made in this chapter is that the book shifts theoretically from an autonomy of migration perspective toward mobile commons. The emphasis here, like in autonomy of migration scholarship, is on mobility before control-or, in other words, on what migrants do, and how they actively engage in their lives and environments, as opposed to the power exerted by states through practices of bordering to interrupt these political acts. In this context, the introduction of commoning is a means to turn toward how migrants occupy and make use of spaces beyond state control. Across the book's following three chapters, the conception of mobile commoning is put into dialogue with discussion of the histories, spatialities, and "snapshots" taken from current day Istanbul, Athens, and Nicosia. These snapshots look at how city space is occupied, and what tactics migrants engage in while occupying this urban space. One example given of mobile commoning within these snapshots is a description of
This article explores the constructions and dynamics of subaltern migrant subjectivities in three arrival cities, Athens, Istanbul and Nicosia. The paper draws on empirical research in three cities geopolitically located in the most south-eastern part of the Mediterranean basin and the boundary triangle connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. This is essentially a process where the will, agency and praxis of subaltern migrants in the context of social struggles are interwoven with precarious spaces. Precarity is at the core of their daily existence: precarious labour, precarious stay and precarious lives. The generation, maintenance, evolution, even erosion of mobile commons are consequential of social processes and struggles driven by subaltern and precarious subjects, migrants and non-migrants alike. The article explores how the generation of claims to rights is restructuring Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, as new forms of commons through mobility, resistance and digital materialities are contesting the sovereign governance and surveillance technologies in Europe and beyond. The paper contends that such perspectives from the borders of Europe, that is, in and out of Europe, are not only crucial to the understanding of what is happening in Europe, but are an advanced glimpse into potentialities of the world ahead.
Social work historiography has neglected to engage meaningfully with the most troubling aspects of the profession’s past: the histories of complicity, or at least acquiescence, in acts of state violence and institutionalised oppression. Through the exploration of historical case studies, this article provides a tentative typology of social work’s ‘horrible histories’ focusing on the project of engineering the ideal-type family, in colonial and oppressive socio-political contexts. The authors argue that practices of oppression and complicity can neither be reduced to the ‘few bad apples’ approach nor judged through the individualising prism of moralism, prevalent in Kantian Ethics. Instead, they propose an ethics of transformative reconciliation which is based on the principles of apology, respect for victims and collective action for—professional and social—change.
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