Becoming In/Visible – A Strategy of Migrant Resistance

The event is part of the seminar series Migration in a Global Perspective and will take place on February 7, Room 102, Faculty of Sociology and Social Assistance, Panduri Campus at 17.00.

Migrants protests and actions such as Sans Papiers, No One Is Illegal, No Borders, Vienna Refugee Protests, ‘A Day Without Us’ marches, and others migrant protests from the last decade, engage in public demonstrations and occupy public/symbolic places to create a stage that can provide validity for their claims and where they can appear to others as subjects entitled to equal rights. At the same time, diverse forms of migrant struggles take place in less publicly visible spaces or even by avoiding the dominant regimes of visibility through escape, falsification of papers, destruction of identity documents, or “identity-stripping,” destruction of fingertips to avoid biometrical identification, and others form of everyday resistance by which migrants render themselves unclassifiable, imperceptible, and unidentifiable. This paper aims to examine what is the nature of this ‘invisible’ resistance and what are its implications for the state’s exercise of sovereignty, by addressing the following questions: How can something, including migration, be framed as ‘invisible’? What is the relation between the regimes of visibility and invisibility in migration? What makes the acts of migrants rendering themselves unidentifiable acts of resistance? How do these practices question and subvert the borders and order of nation-states? How could these forms of invisible politics create trans- and post-national spaces?



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