On the ethical dimension of irregular migrants’ lives: Affect, becoming and information

This commentary reflects upon Miriam Tedeschi’s (2020) use of Gilbert Simondon’s work to examine the lived experience of irregular migrants in Finland. It considers what Simondon’s ideas illuminate as well as what they appear to leave relatively unexamined. If we are to understand the lived experience of irregular migrants, it is argued that we need theoretical resources that more fully foreground social and political processes of welcome/unwelcome, recognition/disregard and hospitality/hostility. To the extent that Simondon’s work supports only a generalised consideration of such matters, it might usefully be supplemented by perspectives that address them in more depth. In this regard, it is suggested that postcolonial and critical geographical scholarship could enable fuller recognition of and attunement to the complex lived experience of irregular migrants.

Section: Encountering Simondonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this commentary I reflect upon Miriam Tedeschi’s (2021) article on the lives of irregular migrants in Finland. In particular, I consider her use of Gilbert Simondon’s ideas, discussing what they illuminate but also what they appear to leave relatively unexamined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognition and attunement in migration research

Conradson

2020

“…As a phenomenon underpinned by fluidity and radical difference, migration always escapes reductive theorisations. Tedeschi’s (2021) article offers a broader understanding of migration by drawing on the ideas of Simondon (2005). Supported by research findings on irregular migrants in Finland, she raises important questions about the construction of an individual and her existence on the move.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Mind the gap’: Responding to the indeterminable in migration

Shubin

2020

Prompted by Miriam Tedeschi’s ((2020) On the ethical dimension of irregular migrants’ lives: affect, becoming and information. Dialogues in Human Geography. Epub 17 July 2020. DOI: 10.1177/2043820620940062) article, this commentary attempts to unsettle the dominant understanding of a relation in migration research that prioritises linkages between people, places, and organisations while treating boundaries as limits to overcome. Building on geographers’ earlier engagements with Adorno, Levinas, and extending this conversation to include Blanchot, the analysis attempts to move beyond the hold of mastery on a relation with alterity. This commentary argues for an interruptive non-relation that resists the appropriation and affirms the dispersion of the self by the alterity it cannot internalise. It offers an alternative response to difference in migration that avoids bringing it to unifying continuity. Instead of treating interruptions in migration as gaps to be resolved through language, I consider the possibility of a neutral writing that reflects the powerlessness to say the unspeakable. In a movement of inscription and effacement, neutral writing invokes the unspeakable pain and affliction that exceeds the concepts to which it gives rise. The neuter answers for the non-subject of loss and trauma, the nothing often haunting international migrants.

“…Miriam Tedeschi’s (2021) introduction to Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy adds to a growing movement seeking to enliven the conceptual vocabulary of migration theory. Too often the migration ‘problematic’ is framed in terms that only reify the nation-state, privilege sedentarism, and reduce accounts of movement to shallow economic drivers and consequences (Carling and Collins, 2018; Nail, 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Migration ethics in pandemic times

Collins

2020

Geographical approaches to studying migration have recently been substantially enlivened by the introduction of social theory from a range of traditions – poststructural, feminist, new materialist, and postcolonial, amongst others. Tedeschi’s introduction of Gilbert Simondon’s notions of individuation, affect, and ethics offers an interesting and important addition to this growing movement to reconceptualising migration. In this commentary, I reflect on the potential of Tedeschi’s approach in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for border control and migration. I argue that while the focus on indivdiuation and individual-environment articulations is valuable, Tedeschi’s argument also problematically sets aside collective individuation, affect, and ethics as well as their potential for addressing precarity. Here lies the risk for reconceptualising migration studies – that researchers aim for ever more granular accounts of migration but perhaps lose sight of the politics and ethics of transforming systems and circumstances in ways that enhance migrant lives.