Background
This was presented at the 2023 conference of the American Association of Geographers.
Abstract
This paper examines how racialized, classed, and gendered refugees, through mutual aid practices, engage in prefigurative spatial politics that directly respond to organized state abandonment in order to reach community peace and development. This comparative work builds on research with Congolese refugees in Rwanda (2021-2022), Syrian women in Turkey (2014-2016) and Venezuelan musicians in Peru (2017-2019). With each site representing a unique spatial configuration – the camp, slum, and ghetto – I explore the question of how mutual aid traverses a multiplicity of carceral spaces, revealing its intersectional nuances across geographies. I show how host country states’ aversion to risk and conflict leads to the production of global sites of carceration where refugees are contained, excluded, and abandoned. Responding to these conditions, refugees inhabiting these spaces draw on their own community resources to form bottom-up peaceful relations and development practices centered on care-based mutual aid where power without or beyond the state is exercised. This focus on solidarities outside the state transcends the bulk of forced migration studies that either focus on the ‘bare life’ of refugees, positioning them as relatively powerless within carceral spaces of asylum, or that which constitutes forced migrants as ‘agents’ exercising power within structural conditions.
Availability
Presentation slides are available here.
nikparent.com 