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Please note change in venue:
the event will be held in Hall E, Gateway Building, University of Malta Msida Campus and not at Razzett tal-Ħursun, Mediterranean Institute (as announced previously)

Anthropology Department Research Seminar

Borderworkers’ moral considerations and the humanitarian-security tension inherent in the EU’s Mediterranean external border

Speaker: Dr Daniela DeBono 

Affiliation: Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFAS Fellow, European University Institute & Malmö University

The seminar is open to the public.

Abstract

Borderworkers challenge the dominant notion of the ‘humanitarian border’ and in so doing, their portrayal as ‘cogs in the wheel’. This is significant since institutional actors in this field tend to position themselves along the humanitarian-security axis. Borderworkers as frontline field personnel working ‘on the ground’ with incoming migrants give a different rendition of the border system which is based on their strategic location in the system. Their narratives are interesting not only because they shed light on paradoxical elements constitutive of the first reception system, but because they are attempts at rationalising the system and their own role within it. Typically, narratives are infused with both ethical concerns and cynicism, and the migrant rendered to ‘bare life’ serves as a moral compass. These fraught narratives point towards the inherent tensions in the border regime constructed on moral foundations which can make it difficult to accommodate the ‘human’. By analysing the ‘twisting and turning’ of the narratives of borderworkers, I will explore how they cross cut on issues considered irreconcilable in dominant representations. This presentation builds on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Lampedusa and Sicily between 2015 and 2017 with borderworkers working for a range of different entities such as the police forces, international organisations, EU agencies, local NGOs, and migrants.

Light refreshments will be provided.