Category: North America

Who’s in the fast lane? Will new border tech deliver seamless travel for all?

Posted on by Emily

Migration, Mobilities and Digital Technologies – a special series published in association with the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures.

By Travis Van Isacker.

For the past year I have been attending border industry conferences to understand the future claims they are making as part of my research on digitised borders for the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Listening to their keynotes and speaking with industry professionals I have learned that the border crossing of the future is imagined as a ‘seamless’ one, devoid of gates, booths, even border officers. In their place will be ‘biometric corridors’ lined with cameras observing people as they move. Captured images will be fed back to computer systems matching facial biometrics ‘on the fly’ with those held in a database of expected arrivals. Passports will not be needed as travellers will digitally share all necessary information—biographical details, images of faces and fingerprints, travel permissions—with states and carriers before a trip. There will be no need to stop and question people at the border as they will have been vetted and pre-authorised before leaving their homes. Any people considered ‘risky’ will not even be able to book tickets. The goal: ‘good’ travellers won’t feel the cold gaze of the border’s scrutiny, nor be slowed down.

‘PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE: Seamless Traveller Journey’. World Travel & Tourism Council, April 2019 (image: original photograph cropped, from the World Travel & Tourism Council Flickr account)

This seamless vision is mostly shared by governments who do not want to give visitors a bad first impression and consider that most travellers do not pose any risk. However, there are still differing levels of enthusiasm for the seamless border depending upon, for example, a state’s economic dependence on tourism, or its concern about a terrorist attack. Curaçao recently launched its Express Pass to allow travellers to provide passport information and a selfie from home to then (hopefully) be quickly and automatically verified at the border. By contrast, the United States still does not use automated ePassport gates despite already biometrically verifying all travellers upon entry and exit.

‘Faster meets more secure’. Biometric Facial Comparison advertisement, Miami International Airport, June 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

There has long been a trade-off between speed and security at the border. Screening, searching and questioning people all take time, and that means disgruntled passengers, travel delays, economic loss and press headlines that can make a country less appealing for travel and investment. New digital border technologies promise to resolve this tension. Automated identification through biometrics claims to work with greater speed, accuracy and consistency than humans, allowing for increased security and expedited checks. Advanced data analytics makes a similar claim: knowing more about people earlier, and ‘risking’ them algorithmically, allows digital borders to automatically deflect those it considers undesirable at an earlier stage. By combining these systems, the border industry promises to reduce to seconds the time it takes average business travellers to clear immigration.

The seamless vision of the future border is sold to us all, but is it actually for everyone? A facial recognition system I observed for passengers to bypass showing their passports to a border officer when disembarking cruise ships in Miami failed to deliver for families with small children and people who did not have a passport. There were no suitable images of their faces in the government’s database to match against. Later, I explained to border experts my difficulties in getting airlines to allow me to board flights to the UK with my European identity card. I was told by the vice-president of a facial biometrics company that it sounded as if I was ‘trying to make a point’. Why didn’t I just always carry my passport to avail myself of the eGates? For him it wasn’t only illogical that I wasn’t always able to adopt the most ‘seamless’ path, it was suspicious.

Technologies claiming to offer a seamless border crossing for everyone in fact create a two-tiered system. True, some experience an accelerated border crossing, but those who, for whatever reason, cannot satisfy the tech’s requirements are held up, if allowed to cross at all. The fact that border professionals are all in the first group means they usually don’t experience their systems not working for them.

Edited photograph of the arrivals hall of the Miami Cruise Terminal, June 2024. To the left are exit lanes with facial recognition tablets. To the right is the long queue of people waiting to see an officer (image: author’s photograph)

At industry events there is limited recognition of the fact seamlessness is not necessarily what it claims to be. A senior manager for one of the world’s largest systems integrators (an IT and management consultancy contracted by states to implement border tech) admitted that, actually, a ‘frictionless’ border was not the end goal. Instead, the future border would be one that applies ‘variable friction’, easily speeding up or slowing down movement depending on who or what is crossing it.

Despite the hype around tech-enabled seamless crossings there is nothing to guarantee that the widespread adoption of new digital border tech will necessarily take us towards that future. Just recently, the UK Home Office took Jordan off its list of countries allowed to use its new Electronic Travel Authorisation (which uses an app to biometrically enrol people’s faces at home) due to an increase in the number of Jordanian nationals travelling to the UK to claim asylum, and for purposes other than what is permitted under visitor rules. Perhaps the clearest example is the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), which will require third country nationals to provide face and fingerprint biometrics against which to verify their entering and leaving the Schengen-bloc. This system promises to eventually allow for faster automated crossings but is primarily intended to identify overstayers and strengthen border checks, especially against criminal records databases which are centred on fingerprints. Despite state-of-the-art biometric enrolment kiosks and tablets, there have been nightmarish predictions for the disruption caused when suddenly everyone entering or leaving the EU has to stop to provide their biometrics at the border, especially at the Port of Dover. The fact that the implementation of EES has been delayed for years and was recently postponed again, without a new timeline for implementation, proves just how contingent the future border is.

Sign announcing works in the Port of Dover for Entry/Exit System’s enrolment zone, August 2024 (image: author’s photograph)

State initiatives to increase friction at the border often frustrate those working to develop and sell new border technologies. Some I spoke with believe quite wholeheartedly that everyone will soon be able to cross borders without even realising it, in large part thanks to their inventions. They like to think our modern, globalised world has moved on from the need for severe mobility restrictions and heavy-handed border controls and that we would all be more prosperous if everyone could travel more easily. Unfortunately, the opposite appears to be true. With anti-immigration rhetoric increasing in the world’s richer countries, the EU is currently facing the collapse of restriction-free travel within the Schengen area (itself enabled by immense databases of people considered risky and/or foreign built in the early 2000s). However, luckily for the borders’ builders, their products—originally developed for applications in defence, security and policing, and designed to better identify and surveil individuals—are just as suited to a future in which states are walled off from one another, and movement between them is heavily monitored and restricted. If and when this future vision becomes promoted instead of seamlessness largely depends upon the political moment and intended audience.

Travis Van Isacker is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol working in the Moving Domain of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. His research focuses on the transformation of border infrastructures through the application of new digital technologies. Travis has written previously for the MMB blog on ‘Environmental racism in the borderland: the case of Calais‘.

Find out more about the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures here.

Footsore/footloose: mobile foot technologies

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Radhika Subramaniam.

It was the boots that first caught my eye. They sat there, two or three, on a large table, looking in good nick, creased into a visible sense of comfort. Whether they were on view as available options or whether they had been tried on earlier that day wasn’t clear. The afternoon meal and distribution were done and people had dispersed. All around the table were crates, each labelled by size, piled with pairs of shoes, their laces knotting them together.

The boots were in the ‘warehouse’. Everyone called it that in English, and it was hard to know what to expect as we drove through quiet Calais streets lined with rocks, the ubiquitous ‘borderscaping’ to which Victoria Hattam has drawn attention. But warehouse it really was, a cavernous shed located on a side street, impeccably organized with every kind of personal gear. Clothes and shoes, children’s toys, electrical gear as well as sleeping bags, blankets, tents and logs were stacked in well demarcated zones. The stated purpose of L’Auberge des Migrants, which operates the facility in partnership with several other migrant support initiatives, is to be a logistical and humanitarian platform for people in exile, providing material support and advocacy. The warehouse (‘entrepôt’ in French on their website) in Calais is both a distribution centre for materials as well as for tinned food, hot meals and conversation.

Walking boots in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

I have been thinking a lot about feet of late, how their agency and mobility have been sedentarized into weighty, leaden traces to which the metaphors of carbon footprints, digital footprints and building footprints testify. But feet are meant to wander, making shoes a quintessential mobile technology. Foot coverings not only make it possible to go farther and faster; their lack can substantially hinder movement, especially in a world unfriendly to the bare foot. Even as shod feet are a mark of urbanity and civilization, unshod feet can come to signify poverty, unworldliness, even mental illness. For those who want to be on the move, who must travel atop variable surfaces, in different seasons, there are few needs more important than footwear. Those on the road who come to the warehouse look for boots, sneakers or trainers, and shower slippers.

Emptied personal belongings have a powerful charge. Artists and anthropologists have explored personal and political issues through the material artifacts of forced and voluntary migration – as, for instance, Ai Wei Wei’s public installations with orange life jackets or anthropologist Jason De Leon’s collections of backpacks, water bottles and photographs as part of the Undocumented Migration Project. Piles of shoes are some of the most gripping memorials of the Holocaust exhibited in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Auschwitz. Imprinted with the residue of the person, they are also a reminder of a life’s extinguishment. In the warehouse, although the boots had been worn, they still looked purposeful.

Boots and shoes stored in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

Provisioning is not the only way shoes insert themselves into the cross-currents of migration politics. In 2005, Argentinean artist Judi Werthein premiered a project called Brinco as part of inSite, an organization that produced collaborative artistic projects and public interventions in the San Diego–Tijuana region of the U.S. –Mexico borderlands. Werthein launched a pair of sneakers under the trademark Brinco (Jump) to expose the differential policies and contradictions that impact and control international borders, labour and migration. The sneakers were outfitted with a mini-compass, a flashlight, insoles that doubled as a map indicating the best crossing points and alerting people to treacherous terrain, the image of a saint of migrants and a pocket for money or painkillers. In Tijuana, Werthein distributed the sneakers for free to migrants intending to cross the border, while on the U.S. side they were sold in an exclusive boutique as a limited-edition art object. She had the sneakers manufactured in China to underscore how the transnational movement of cheap goods and commodities works in direct opposition to the regulations and barriers to the movement of people. The project sparked controversy and personal threats to the artist, opposed by those who felt she was aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

In June 2018, Oxfam released a briefing paper Nowhere But Out about the failure of the French and Italian authorities to help refugees and migrants stranded in the Italian town of Ventimiglia. France had re-established border controls in 2015, effectively suspending the free movement guaranteed between Schengen states. Many of those who crossed the border into France were being returned to Italy. The report accused the French border police of forms of callous violence, such as confiscating mobile phones and SIM cards and forcing people to return on foot. The report also quoted the Oxfam Open Europe project leader, Chiara Romagna, who said, ‘Some children even had the soles of their shoes cut off, before being sent back to Italy.’ Of course, evoking the child victim is a humanitarian trope that draws on what Miriam Ticktin identifies as the innocence they embody. Still, surely some children could be carried, shoes or not. Even as routine border violence goes, cutting off the soles of shoes is inept and strangely spiteful. Why target shoes?

These boots are made for walkin’, as the song goes. Tents and backpacks might be as snail shells, the homes we carry, but shoes are emphatically not houses for feet. To the footloose and footsore alike, they kick at the heels and in so doing, they seem to kick up enough dust to strike a political nerve. There is more symbolic heft knotted into those laced boots than we imagine – and a resolute and relentless drive to movement in every ordinary pair of feet.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships. Her book, Footprint: Four Itineraries, is forthcoming in 2025.

Migration and mobilities research: making connections for social justice

Posted on by Emily

By Bridget Anderson.

Happy New Year all. Let’s hope that 2024 brings more peace and justice than 2023. We need it. It is difficult to be hopeful in the face of the ongoing Gaza horror, more needless (and nameless) deaths in the Mediterranean and Channel, the fall out from the Illegal Migration Act, and the anticipated Rwanda legislation. All these speak to the concerns of many MMB members. Not only migration and asylum policy, but state violence, exclusion, citizenship, nationalism, mobility and immobility, leaving and staying put and, related to all of these, the protean nature of racism.

Many of us believe that it is our academic responsibility to speak truth to power and leverage our analysis to affect transformation. But in reality the transformation has been travelling in the opposite direction to the one demanded by evidence and analysis. Over the past 20 years there has been a proliferation of migration research, Masters’ courses, conferences, journals, centres and networks, particularly in the rich world. Our understanding of human movement and the tools we use to analyse it have undoubtedly improved hugely. So why is it that law and policy are so determinedly taking us in the opposite direction, and we seem to be marching away, not only from justice, but from simple common sense? Anyone who is interested in this kind of question would do well to read Christina Boswell’s work. In her book The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research (Cambridge 2009) she explains that the usual explanations for the disconnection between policy and research (political pressure; institutional incapacity/lack of resources on the part of government and other research users; abstraction/irrelevance on the part of research producers) are correct but insufficient. She argues that research and expertise also lend credibility, meaning that they serve two important functions for government policymakers. The first is a legitimizing function, creating confidence that decisions are well founded. The second is a substantiating function, supporting already existing policy choices and preferences.

Importantly, the legitimizing and substantiating functions of research are powerful but are not helpful if we seek a significant change in policy direction. To be transformative, scholarly research requires partnership with non-academic actors and to contribute to pressures for change these actors are exerting on state policymakers. MMB members are working with others to rise to this challenge. We have many examples, but just to pick two. Katharine Charsley and Helena Wray’s research UK-EU couples after Brexit works with key campaigning and support organisations to intervene in policy debates on the issues in the family migration regime. Ann Singleton, MMB Policy Strategic Lead, has been working with ACH to use expertise from refugees’ lived and learned experience to develop new small businesses, and models for support that facilitate integration. MMB also co-organises seminars with ACH, bringing together practitioners, policymakers and academics. The most recent seminar took education as its theme, and participants included Rob Sharples from the School of Education discussing his research on post-16 education and the Bristol Plan for Migrant Learners. Do let us know if you want support finding community partners, developing funding ideas with them or featuring collaborations on the MMB website.

Importantly, research does not have to have an immediate impact to make a difference. MMB’s tagline is ‘new thinking on people and movement’ and this also requires ‘slow science’. Longer term, research can build different understandings of migration – for example, through connecting it with movement of the more-than-human, including goods, data, animals and plants; through putting it into a richer historical context that sees how movement shapes our worlds; and through analysing and making accessible the power of representation. All of this requires multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches whose ‘pathways to impact’ are not necessarily easily traceable, but which help us to think differently and hone tools for the future. We are very pleased that Bristol University Press will be publishing a volume with us that advances this kind of thinking and are planning to develop this work in the coming years.

Thinking differently also needs international partnerships, and this is particularly true for thinking differently about movement. MMB research often is not only shaped by international borders but stretches across them. We have already learned much from the initial visit by Victoria Hattam from the New School for Social Research who joined us as a Visiting Leverhulme Professor for two months in 2023. Her second, longer visit will start in February 2024. Do come to the MMB welcome drinks on 6th February to learn more about our plans with her, which include public lectures, a workshop on visual representation, seminars on race and mobility, political economy and cross-border production, and a PGR discussion group.

Developing and nurturing these partnerships is a priority for MMB in the next two years. We are delighted that Jo Crow, Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, has joined us as Associate Director (Research Development) to take the lead in developing this aspect of MMB’s work. We are particularly interested to learn about the research agendas of potential partnerships to facilitate long-term collaboration, funded and unfunded, so do let us know if you have any ideas. We are keen to support project and network development, big or small. Partnerships, within and outside the university, local, national and international, lend new perspectives, energy and creativity. Let’s harness that to build a more just world in 2024.

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Borderscapes: policing within

Posted on by Emily

Borderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover.

By Victoria Hattam.

Governments around the globe have been building border walls for decades: Calais is no exception. At least since the Touquet Treaty, the UK government has helped fund the securitization of the Port of Calais through a variety of construction projects. Cement walls, white-mesh-razor-wire fencing, and landscaping are being used to restrict undocumented migrants from crossing from Calais to Dover. Bordering is an expensive business: the House of Commons Research Briefing puts the UK financial commitment to France between 2014 and the 2022/23 financial year at slightly more than GBP 232 million (Gower, 2023). And even this figure, Gower notes, underestimates the total cost as supplemental payments can be found in most years. In 2018, for example, the supplemental payment for Calais bordering was an additional GBP 45.5 million in addition the initial allocation.

Calais white-mesh-razor-wire wall (image: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

I was fortunate to be able to join an MMB trip to Calais last summer and found even my short trip revealing. I began to see the slippage from walls to landscaping. Intense as border walls, razor wire, and surveillance technologies are, it is the landscape design that has stuck with me. Long after one leaves the border proper, bordering continues. 

Bouldering mobility

Hundreds of large boulders have been placed throughout Calais, packed close together, filling a variety of once open spaces. Small parks, spaces underneath bridges, and even small median strips alongside roadways and city intersections now are occupied by rocks rather than people. The materials of choice are decorative boulders: large rocks, generally 3-5 feet in diameter, irregularly shaped, placed in irregular patterns as if in a natural setting. At times, the boulders are accompanied by an array of ornamental grasses: tall, textured, different shades of pale yellow, browns and greens – a touch of Russian Sage for brighter color. The grasses sway in the breeze contrasting with the immovable boulders. It’s a look. Hardscaping, as landscape designers often refer to it, can be found throughout the city.

Boulders filling public space in Calais
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Fixation points, the French government argues, are being unfixed by making it impossible for people on the move to congregate (Pascual et al., 2023: Van Isacker, 2020). One can sit on the boulders, one might even be able to lie down between them, but they are placed tightly together making congregation and encampment difficult. The so called ‘Jungle’ of Calais is not to be repeated. Landscape design is a new frontier of border policing.

After a day of walking the city, it is difficult to distinguish public beautification projects from border policing. Ponds, parks, flowerbeds all make the city greener, but these very same elements are designed to make Calais less hospitable to the undocumented by removing vegetive cover. 

Boulders and walls control movement differently. The recently constructed white-mesh-razor-wire fences are designed to stop undocumented migrants from crossing over to the UK. For walls, movement is the problem. Boulders carry with them a different politics: move along now, do not gather here. For boulder landscaping, it’s the stopping that is threatening. Walls and boulders create a double opposition in which neither moving nor staying in place are permitted. Migrants, as Nandita Sharma (2020) has argued, are those deemed out of place.

Border creep

The turn to landscaping materializes the ways in which border policing is never simply a matter of securing territorial perimeters. Border security bleeds into internal policing (Ngai, 2004). In Calais, and many other cities, a variety of bordering devices can be found within the city limits. Temporary steel fence sections sit on street corners standing at the ready, waiting to be called to action. Heavy metal poles also have been inserted into the middle of the sidewalk diverting and obstructing movement. The poles are not placed alongside footpaths but are inserted right where one might usually walk. Obstruction is everywhere.

The border creeps from territorial edge into the city proper
(images: Victoria Hattam, July 2023)

Aesthetics and politics: what politics do boulders carry?

Living and working in New York City, I am accustomed to highly securitized spaces.  Sidewalks, roads, and buildings are often blocked off, supposedly protected by the deployment of anti-bombing barricades. But New York barricades have a different aesthetic. Rather than natural, irregular, softer boulders, New York City barricades present as manufactured objects: straight lines and crisp edges, often stamped with the New York Police Department initials (NYPD) making clear that this is an official barrier. There is no mistaking NY barricades for landscape features. The barricade of choice is the Jersey Barrier that is materialized both in cement and heavy-duty plastic. Few flowers and grasses are included to soften the look. Security is front and centre.

Jersey Barricades near the United Nations, New York City
(images: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)
Westside Highway, Manhattan, New York City (image: Victoria Hattam, October 2023)

At times, there is a grunge counter aesthetic in New York in which garbage mingles alongside security barriers.

Jersey Barriers were introduced in the 1940s and 50s through Departments of Transportation as devices for minimizing incidental damage during traffic accidents. Over the last 50 years, the barriers have been used in a wide array of policy domains, including deployment by the Department of Homeland Security at the US-Mexico border and by the Department of Defense in Iraq. Traffic management devises have morphed into security objects (Copp, 2018; U.S. Department of Defense, 2006).

The shift from walls to boulders does not diminish hostility towards migrantized people. On the contrary, it extends that hostility inwards. Consider the street alongside Little Island, the newly constructed park that sits just off Manhattan on the Hudson River. Little Island aspires to be a ‘magical place’, but as one enters and exits, there is a sign in big bold letters stipulating that this is an ‘enforcement zone’. Parking and bordering merge. I can no longer easily distinguish one from the other.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, New York. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. Victoria is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, hosted by MMB. During 2023-24 she is giving numerous workshops, seminars and public lectures at Bristol – read more about her events here.

Other blogposts in our series on Calais include ‘Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands‘ by Juan Zhang, ‘Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais‘ by Bridget Anderson and ‘Notes from a visit to Calais‘, a video blogpost by Nariman Massoumi.

Organising against fear: migrant nannies and domestic workers during COVID

Posted on by Emily

New writing on migration and mobilities – an MMB special series

By Maud Perrier

Migrant nannies and domestic workers were largely absent from mainstream feminist commentary during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as from public discussion of childcare. In the UK broadsheets, most of the media coverage of the childcare crisis during this time was dominated by stories of working mothers’ struggles to manage caring for children and working from home. The unequal division of labour between men and women, and fears about women’s stalled careers and promotion gaps in the near future, were the main sources of middle-class feminist anxiety. As Veronica Deutsch argues the middle-classes expertise as orators of their own suffering along with pandemic-induced nationalism combined to position migrant nannies as out of reach from public sympathy.

(Image: Félix Prado on Unsplash)

The depiction of the pandemic as representing the ‘death of the working mother’ reproduced a white liberal feminist analysis that simultaneously privileged individual professional success and invisibilised these women’s reliance on paid childcare. At the same time the demand for live-in nannies as a safe option increased substantially and there was mounting evidence globally that domestic workers faced heightened restrictions on their movements and ability to see their families, and that many faced unemployment, homelessness and death after catching the virus at work. Two years on from the start of COVID, how can we centre the experiences of migrant and racialised minority nannies’ who organised during the pandemic to shift how we think about solidarity and care between women across ‘race’ and migration status?

Between October 2020 and February 2021, I carried out interviews with nanny organisers through two worker-led grass-roots organisations – one with migrant nannies in the UK and the other with nannies and domestic workers in the US – to learn how their organising changed during the pandemic. The Boston-based organisers belong to the Matahari Women Workers’ Centre, a medium-sized long-established organisation, but the London Nanny Solidarity Network was only established during COVID. The Nanny Solidarity Network was set up to respond to the destitution that migrant nannies in West London faced during the pandemic and within a few weeks was delivering English-language training, mutual aid, welfare support and immigration/employment legal advice to more than 100 members.

Across both sites, my interviewees reported that for many nannies in their organisations their relationships with parent-employers significantly worsened during the pandemic and were characterised by increased fear and vulnerability. Nannies recounted stories of employers breaking lockdown rules and not following social-distancing regulations. One interviewee was asked to come into work after her employer’s family returned from a trip abroad without following quarantine rules. Another was asked to look after a friend’s child without considering the heightened risk of transmission for the nanny. Anastancia Cuna, a well-known domestic worker organiser, aptly describes these situations as employers capitalising on the economic conditions of the pandemic.

To fight this climate of fear, the Domestic Employers Network successfully developed resources to empower workers to navigate this increased vulnerability – for example, COVID contracts and guidance about safe working, which workers could use to hold their employers to account. The conversation guide includes the discussion of procedures adopted to reduce exposure when someone tests positive, as well as transport and entering work routines. It also includes a section recommending that employers commit to higher rates of pay during the pandemic and agree to give nannies paid time off for sickness or for relatives’ sickness. These documents form an important part of the organisation’s praxis empowering workers to refuse to give in to fear. The resources suggest quite a different story about how to negotiate deepening divisions during the pandemic, which highlights the importance of formal legal frameworks in building solidarity. At a time when few governments offered any formal protection for these workers, a last resort was to appeal to employers’ consciences about their legal responsibilities.

The pandemic put on hold the well-documented organising that is historically carried out by nannies in public parks across the globe, as well as their shame demonstrations outside employers’ homes. But organisations like the Nanny Solidarity Network and Matahari Women Workers’ Center developed methods to continue building worker power virtually through online assemblies. They also managed the distribution of state aid in the US via the National Domestic Workers Alliance and in the UK through mutual aid. But interviewees emphasised that temporarily becoming a cash assistance organisation proved challenging at times as it contradicted their aim of building worker power. Online spaces of sociality were also vital sources of community survival for unemployed workers throughout and beyond the pandemic in both countries.

Pre pandemic, discussions of teachers’ and childcare workers’ strikes assumed that solidarity between parents and teachers and between lecturers and students would act as a strategic wedge in labour relations, which neoliberal senior managers underestimated at their peril. Jane McAveley describes these ties as the ‘ace up the sleeve’ of care workers who can mobilise their ties to the community to their advantage in such disputes. My research showed that while nannies in the UK and the US may not be able to count on such direct community solidarity, they have developed alternative techniques of building allyship and community within a hostile environment.

Scholars and activists have long been calling for more intimate organising in feminised sectors whereby the relational ties between caregivers and care-receivers are leveraged to secure gains from employers and governments. What these nannies’ voices suggest is that the question of intimacy with whom needs to be much more at the centre of this discussion post pandemic. This requires careful consideration if more worker-led migrant organisations are to join coalitions with low-income parents and low-paid childcare workers – such as the Care that Works coalition – which are powerful enough to hold states to account for their disappearing act.

Maud Perrier is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on care workers’ organising, social reproduction theory, motherhood and maternal workers, socialist feminist movements in UK, North America and Australia. Her most recent book is Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction (Bristol University Press, 2022). A recording of the book launch with MMB Director Bridget Anderson is available here.

Somatic shifts: the politics of movement in the time of COVID

Posted on by Emily

Letter from Afar – the blog series about life and research in the time of COVID-19.

By Victoria Hattam.

Dispatch from Brooklyn, NY.
September 2020

COVID-19 has returned questions of migration and mobility to the centre of politics by upending the distribution of mobility privileges. Who is allowed – or required – to move is changing; many are trying to assess the consequences of such reorderings. I want to extend discussions of the virus by turning our eye from migration and mobility to movement of another kind. Under COVID-19, mobility for many has become less about getting from here to there; less about journeys of one kind or another; less about the movement of things: trade, finance capital, and cross-border production. As Shannon Mattern and others have shown, the virus is pushing the boundaries of mobility by demanding that smaller, differently located shifts be included in any assessment of virus significance. If we remain alert to the possibilities, perhaps the virus can open migration and mobility studies to somatic shifts and in so doing expand the political stakes of the present moment.

The virus has ricocheted through the somatic: distance, stance, breath, fluids, air flows, droplets, spittle have taken on new importance. There is a new awareness of the bodily everyday. What is especially interesting is the malleability of bodily actions; within weeks of hearing that the virus had arrived, and without any visual evidence that it was here, how one walked, talked, moved and stood changed. Space is now of the essence. Give a wide birth. I have been surprised at how quickly quotidian ways of being have shifted. What once seemed entrenched social forms have altered in relatively short order. If bodily actions can change so quickly, maybe habitus is not so fixed after all. Political possibilities open up as well.

Lining up for the Food Co-op, Park Slope, Brooklyn (image: Victoria Hattam, August 2020)

The somatic shifts underway have reminded me of Alan Kaprow’s experimental projects from the 60’s and 70’s. Fluids (1967) and Echo-ology (1975) come to mind. When I was co-teaching the ‘Political Sensorium’ with the late Ann Snitow, New York artist/researcher Robert Sember came to class and enacted one of Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’. It was a simple yet amazingly powerful action – deeply political in ways that resonate for me with the virus now.

The protocols went as follows: Everyone stands in a circle. One person has a teaspoon filled with water. The teaspoon is passed from one person to the next moving around the circle. Once the spoon has been passed all the way around, it changes direction and the spoon is passed back to the beginning. Once completed, the person left holding the spoon swallows the water. The whole action takes no more then 5-10 minutes – depending on the size of the group.

When Sember drank the water, a gasp filled the room. I understood expropriation in a way that I had not before. The visceral political. Disbelief, injustice, outrage followed. What amazed me in the Kaprow action, and what echoes now, was the speed with which I and other participants invested in the care of the water and collectively were outraged by its demise. Within the few minutes that it took to complete the action, we had identified collectively with the spoon’s contents – the careful passing of the spoon from one person to another had created a sense of affective investment in the water. The testament to the identifications generated was revealed by the shock that accompanied the arbitrary consumption of our newly created charge. A cycle of identification and resistance occurred within minutes not years.

Spoon filled with water (image: Victoria Hattam, Brooklyn, New York, August 2020)

Living in the time of COVID-19 has shifted somatic presumptions in powerful ways, changing the terrain of the bodily political.

Kaprow was certainly not the only one to push the envelope with such experimental work: John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Daniel Goode, Fluxus, The Motherfuckers, the Cockettes and many others drew attention to the somatic dimensions of the political through a variety of wide ranging projects.

Many experimental works carry with them a playfulness, a sense of pleasure and lightness of being that is captivating. But often, especially with Kaprow’s Happenings, there is a multi-vocality in which matters of power, futility and loss hover in the works as well. This more somber dimension to the Happenings adds to their salience now. Cage’s playfulness and infectious smile are complicated in Kaprow’s work. Constructing the ice ‘tomb’ that is left to melt, carrying buckets of water up stream in order to tip the water back into the river cast shadows over these collective endeavours. Perhaps a sense of mourning pervades Kaprow’s water actions as they were created not long after his two-year old daughter was killed by a car near their home in Glen Head, Long Island. (But one need not resort to such individualized motives; the power of Kaprow’s events often lay in their capacity to hold possibility and difficulty together.

This other register within Kaprow’s work, the more somber, futile, shadowy elements, echo in the time of COVID-19 when the virus reveals again the deep seated racial violence that constitutes the ground of US politics: infections, deaths and unemployment numbers all are structured by zip codes. The virus has ravaged unequally, exploiting longstanding economic and racial disparities in new ways. Pope L’s street crawls come to mind. In 1991, Pope L lay prone on the street, pot plant placed on the road in front of him, pushing it along the road inch by inch for hours. The Tompkins Square Crawl, as the action is known, was one of several such crawls that enact a powerful sense endurance and struggle.

Alternatively, we might follow Jill Richards into what she calls ‘The Fury Archives’ where movement is key, but takes less teleological forms. First wave feminism was powerful in Richards’ telling not for its end point, not for the retrospective ordering provided by the securing of women’s suffrage decades later. Any such ordering foreshortens the politics as it is happening. It is the long slog of action itself, the ‘long middle’ of small scale conflict without clear end, that Richards foregrounds. That unsettled, shuttling motion resonates now. Where the somatic shifts are taking us is by no means certain.

Under COVID-19 movement has neither ended nor disappeared. It has changed. Movement has moved to the everyday somatic. The political ramifications of somatic shifts are neither natural nor inevitable. They are in good measure ours to shape.

Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School in New York City. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster and of the Transoceanic Mobilities Network. Her current research focuses on US-Mexico border politics and the global political economy. For a recent writing see ‘Race Walls,’ in The Funambulist 31 (September–October 2020).

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