Eeva Puumala - Böcker

The confrontation between asylum seeking and sovereignty has mainly focused on ways in which the movement and possibilities of refugees and migrants are limited. In this volume, instead of departing from the practices of governance and surveillance, Puumala begins with the moving body, its engagements and relations and examines different ways of seeing and sensing the struggle between asylum seekers and sovereign practices. Puumala asserts that our political imagination is being challenged in its ways of ordering, practicing and thinking about the international and those relations we call international. The issues relating to asylum seekers are one example of the deficiencies in the spatiotemporal logic upon which these relations were originally built; words such as ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘community’ are challenged. Conventional methods of governing, regulating and administering increased forms of mobility are in trouble, which gives rise to the invention of new technologies at borders and introduces regulations and spaces of exception. Based on extensive fieldwork that sheds light on a range of Europe-wide practices in the field of asylum and migration policies, this book will be of interest to scholars of IR theory, biopolitics and migration, as well as critical security more broadly.

Using a novel interdisciplinary focus, this title examines cities as sites of coexistence where different ideas, discourses, histories, and people are constantly brought together in the course of everyday life. While the proximity of ‘difference’ has been discussed as a key feature in urban life, its various meanings and the way in which people perceive and make sense of diversity and the presence of inequalities has been met with less attention. To unpack the complex question of how people live together and what is between them in contemporary cities, the book brings together perspectives from a broad range of disciplines and different methodological approaches. As such, the book is also poised to deepen our understanding of the specificity and value of interdisciplinary research through an embedded reflection on how a change in method or theoretical ground also drastically reframes and affects the topic under study. The book thus adds to the knowledge on the specificities of interdisciplinary inquiry and calls for further reflection on its potential and limitations. Exploring how everyday life in cities bears potential in revising the conceptual apparatus through which togetherness and separation are discussed, it will appeal to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students with interests in urban studies, sociology, human geography, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and peace and conflict research.

Using a novel interdisciplinary focus, this title examines cities as sites of coexistence where different ideas, discourses, histories, and people are constantly brought together in the course of everyday life. While the proximity of ‘difference’ has been discussed as a key feature in urban life, its various meanings and the way in which people perceive and make sense of diversity and the presence of inequalities has been met with less attention. To unpack the complex question of how people live together and what is between them in contemporary cities, the book brings together perspectives from a broad range of disciplines and different methodological approaches. As such, the book is also poised to deepen our understanding of the specificity and value of interdisciplinary research through an embedded reflection on how a change in method or theoretical ground also drastically reframes and affects the topic under study. The book thus adds to the knowledge on the specificities of interdisciplinary inquiry and calls for further reflection on its potential and limitations. Exploring how everyday life in cities bears potential in revising the conceptual apparatus through which togetherness and separation are discussed, it will appeal to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students with interests in urban studies, sociology, human geography, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and peace and conflict research.

The confrontation between asylum seeking and sovereignty has mainly focused on ways in which the movement and possibilities of refugees and migrants are limited. In this volume, instead of departing from the practices of governance and surveillance, Puumala begins with the moving body, its engagements and relations and examines different ways of seeing and sensing the struggle between asylum seekers and sovereign practices. Puumala asserts that our political imagination is being challenged in its ways of ordering, practicing and thinking about the international and those relations we call international. The issues relating to asylum seekers are one example of the deficiencies in the spatiotemporal logic upon which these relations were originally built; words such as ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘community’ are challenged. Conventional methods of governing, regulating and administering increased forms of mobility are in trouble, which gives rise to the invention of new technologies at borders and introduces regulations and spaces of exception. Based on extensive fieldwork that sheds light on a range of Europe-wide practices in the field of asylum and migration policies, this book will be of interest to scholars of IR theory, biopolitics and migration, as well as critical security more broadly.

Choreographies of Resistance examines bodies and their capacity for obstructive and resistant action in places and spaces where we do not expect to see it. Drawing on empirical research that considers cases on asylum seekers, beggars, undocumented migrants and migrant nurses, the book attests to the scope and diversity of corporeal resistance in the realm of politics. It is shown that bodies that are not assumed to have political agency can obstruct and resist the smooth functioning of disciplinary practices that nowadays form the core of migration policies. It is argued that the body is more than a mere target of politics. In so doing, the book contributes to the study of the political significance of movement, mobility and the nonverbal. The body opens up a space of political resistance and action. The resistant body poses a challenge that is both praxical and philosophical: it ultimately invites us to reconsider the meanings and content of political space, community and belonging..