Societies 2016, 6(2), 10; doi:10.3390/soc6020010
Bodies Folded in Migrant Crypts: Dis/Ability and the Material Culture of Border-Crossing
1
Technologies in Practice, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2300, Denmark
2
Department of European Civilization Studies, Hellenic Open University, Patra 26335, Greece
3
Department of Philosophy and History of Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens 15771, Greece
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These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 31 December 2015 / Revised: 29 March 2016 / Accepted: 30 March 2016 / Published: 4 April 2016
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Interrogating Representations of dis/Ability within and through Material Culture)
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Abstract
This article considers media narratives that suggest that hiding in trucks, buses, and other vehicles to cross borders has, in fact, been a common practice in the context of migration to, and within, Europe. We aim to problematize how the tension between the materiality of bordering practices and human migrants generates a dis/abled subject. In this context, dis/ability may be a cause or consequence of migration, both in physical/material (the folding of bodies in the crypt) and cultural/semiotic terms, and may become a barrier to accessing protection, to entering and/or crossing a country, and to performing mobility in general. Dis/ability and migration have not been associated in the literature. We adopt an analytical symmetry between humans and non-humans, in this case between bodies and crypts. By suggesting an infected, ambivalent, and hybrid approach to the human subject, the body-crypt traveling border challenges the essentialist dichotomies between technology and biology, disability and impairment. The articles and reports upon which we rely were collected through extensive searches of databases/archives of online newspapers and news websites. View Full-TextKeywords:
border-crossing; crypts; migration; dis/ability; narratives
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
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Galis, V.; Tzokas, S.; Tympas, A. Bodies Folded in Migrant Crypts: Dis/Ability and the Material Culture of Border-Crossing. Societies 2016, 6, 10.
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