Dying to live: migrant deaths and citizenship politics along European borders: transgressions, disruptions, and mobilizations

Governing migration through death in Europe and the US: Identification, burial and the crisis of modern humanism

“…In her analysis of the transgression of state-based citizenship through mobilisations around those 'dying to live', Kim Rygiel (2016) emphasizes the ways in which dead migrants paradoxically often 'count' in ways that people on the move without documentation do not. Similarly, Alexandra Délano Alonso and Benjamin Nienass (2016) point to the ways in which 'material bodies' only become an acknowledged presence in death.…”

“…Doty, 2011;Rygiel, 2010;Vaughan-Williams, 2012), and Achille Mbembe's work on necropolitics (Estevez, 2014;De Leon, 2015). There is also an important body of work that explores the ways in which contestations over migrant deaths un-or re-make citizenship and political community (Rygiel, 2014(Rygiel, , 2016 through practices of grieving (Stierl, 2016), mourning (Bieberstein and Evren, 2016;Délano Alonso and Nienass, 2016), burial (Balkan, 2015a(Balkan, , 2015b and memorial (Zagaria, 2011), all of which reject exclusionary state practices associated with such deaths (Catania, 2015). This article contributes to these literatures by paying attention to the specificities as well as the affinities of contemporary bordering practices in contexts of relative stability and privilege.…”

‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders

“…In this light, activity-based art, especially if it seeks to rupture disengagement, politicize others, and activate denied rights of non-citizens, contributes to the subtle 'doing' and 'undoing' of the social fabric of citizenship. Acts of citizenship themselves, however, are underpinned by diverging rationalities of power, and at times even reinforce instituted citizenship in one way or another (Isin 2014;Rygiel 2016). My analysis pays particular attention to the spectrum of potentialities inherent in each act, and to the ways in which citizenship enactments can enable or limit processes of political subjectivation.…”

“…Scholarly works in critical citizenship and border studies have examined claims articulated by refugees or illegalized travellers (Andrijasevic and Anderson 2009;Weber and Pickering 2011;Nyers and Rygiel 2012;McNevin 2013), refugee 'supporters' or 'humanitarian activists' (Malkki 2015;Hauschild 2016), and joint forms of collective activism (Nyers 2003;Rygiel 2014Rygiel , 2016Ataç et al 2015;Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016;Stierl 2016). Several studies have explicitly focused on arts practices as a tool of mobilization in this area (Amoore and Hall 2010;McNevin 2010;Squire 2014;Hauschild 2016;Stierl 2016), and applied Rancière's writings to migration studies (Nyers 2003;Edkins 2011Edkins , 2015Wilcke and Lambert 2015;Stierl 2016).…”

“…Scholarship in this area has elaborated that acts of citizenship can contest key features of a status-based notion of citizenship, while at the same time strengthening the rules of membership associated with it in other respects (Isin 2014;Rygiel 2016). The framework thus offers a toolkit to unearth progressive ruptures of political registers, and also allows pointing to ways in which art or activism remains situated in its social environment, and is underpinned by and reproduces diverging rationalities and technologies of power.…”