BORDERS AND INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY

The Borders and International Mobility research area and seminar series (BIM) bring together REPI and ULB researchers who share an interest in the interplay between and politics of international demarcations and circulations. It furthers a plural understanding of borders encompassing but also extending beyond practices of territorial delimitation, and advances reflexive analyses of international mobility that question predominant categorisations, in particular that of migrants and migration.

BIM therefore explores how borders and international mobility are governed as well as how they are practiced and lived, with three lines of inquiry of particular interest. First, BIM attaches specific importance to knowledge politics. How are borders and international mobility known, through which modes and techniques of reasoning, calculations, categorisations, through which agencies and circulations? Second, BIM supports a better understanding of how borders and international mobility are materialized, and of the role that sociotechnical devices play in making borders and international mobility possible in the first place. Third, BIM seeks to further examinations of how borders and international mobility sustain both patterns of racialized, gendered and class discrimination and exclusion and patterns of inclusion. Getting a better grasp of who borders and international mobility are for and not, how these patterns are enacted through knowledge politics and how they are materialized, accordingly forms the core of BIM’s objectives.

Coordinators: Julien Jeandesboz, Julia Van Dessel

BIM seminar series:

12 February 2025
Claudia Aradau (King’s College London), Lucrezia Canzutti (King’s College London) – Border agnotologies: Power, technology, resistance
Co-organised with the FNRS contact group IPS Belgium

12 March 2025
Loren Landau (Oxford University) - Rights and resistance as retemporalisation: Reflections on combatting global bordering

16 April 2025
Martin Lemberg-Pedersen (University of Warwick)

26 May 2025
Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche (Institut Universitaire de France, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
Title tbc
Co-organised with Projet Moebius (Sovereignty ordering migrations inside European borders. Uses v. ethics) and the FNRS contact group IPS Belgium