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Desert ‘trash’ : posthumanism, border struggles, and humanitarian politics
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Squire, Vicki (2014) Desert ‘trash’ : posthumanism, border struggles, and humanitarian politics. Political Geography, 39 . pp. 11-21. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.12.003 ISSN 0962-6298.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.12.003
Abstract
What is the political significance of humanitarian activist engagements with the discarded belongings of migrants? This article explores how bordering practices between states resonate with bordering practices between the human and non-human. It argues that attempts to transform ‘desert/ed trash’ into objects of value are nothing less than struggles over the very category of ‘the human’ itself. Focusing on humanitarian engagements with the objects that migrants leave behind across the Mexico-US Sonoran desert, it explores how the politics of human mobility involves the co-constitution of ‘people’, ‘places’ and ‘things’ in multiple ways. By contrast to a posthumanist analysis that emphasises the agency of material things based on a distinction between the human and the nonhuman, I draw on the work of Karen Barad in order to develop a ‘more-than-human’ account of the materialdiscursive un/becomings of subjects-objects-environments as more or less ‘human’. This allows for an analysis of ‘the human’ as a political stake that is produced through struggles to de/value people, places and things, and that is thus subject to contestation as well as to processes of de- and re-composition. The article assesses the various ways that humanitarian engagements contest processes of dehumanisation through the re-configuration of ‘desert/ed trash’. Rather than emphasising re-humanisation, however, I highlight the importance of analysis and practice that rejects the lure of ‘naïve humanism’ and the problematic over- and under-investments of migrant and human agency that such an approach involves. This is important, the article concludes, in order that the multiplicity of ways by which ‘the human’ is made, unmade and remade is accounted for without assuming either the supremacy or the powerlessness of people.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) | ||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Emigration and immigration, Boundaries, Humanitarianism | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Political Geography | ||||||
Publisher: | Elsevier Science Inc. | ||||||
ISSN: | 0962-6298 | ||||||
Official Date: | March 2014 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 39 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 12 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 11-21 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.12.003 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 31 December 2015 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 31 January 2016 |
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