Articles by Miriam Ticktin
Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) BLOG, https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/category/blog/, 2024
Dead End, by Nicola Moscelli (photographer). Penisola Edizioni Publishing House. pp.154-159., 2024
The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere, June 19 2024., 2024
https://tif.ssrc.org/2024/06/19/myriad-intimacies-and-feminist-political-imagination/
Hayv Kahraman: The Foreign in Us, ed. Frauke Josenhans. Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University. Pp. 25-33., 2024
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, eds, Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, Coline Schupfer. Haymarket Press. Pp.39-45., 2024
Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, special issue on “Care Beyond Crisis”, eds. Heike Drotbohm and Hansjorg Dilger. Issue 98, March/April. pp.64-70, 2024
This afterword discusses the three articles in the theme section "Affective regimes of care beyon... more This afterword discusses the three articles in the theme section "Affective regimes of care beyond humanitarian crisis, " suggesting that they offer us important ethnographies that each pry open and reevaluate the nature of care, including its political potential. Building on how these alternative forms shift the meaning and practice of care, but focusing on the one structuring hierarchy of humanitarianism left intact-racism-I end by briefly discussing the more radical politics of care being articulated by The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) to show how politics and care are being combined to create revolutionary political platforms.
The Baffler (magazine), 2023
American Journal of International Law, symposium on “Infrastructuring International Law”, 117: 11-15. January 2023., 2023
Since 2015 when migration across the Mediterranean was declared a "crisis" in Europe, the languag... more Since 2015 when migration across the Mediterranean was declared a "crisis" in Europe, the language of crisis and invasion has persisted, structuring conversations and political imaginations. This has led many to argue for the strict closure of borders and the deportation of migrants or "people on the move," 1 and to a deepening set of racisms within borders. But this "crisis" has also led to a less publicized, opposing struggle against borders, in the service of a more egalitarian world. I argue that in order to really understand how borders are being regulated or unregulated, we need to look not only at the international legal realm, but also at infrastructural politics. 2 In this Essay, I will discuss two different terrains of infrastructural struggle over migration and borders: the first is about border walls, which are built to close off resources and partition the world into haves and have nots; the second is an infrastructure of collective living, where people-on-the-move are occupying abandoned spaces and working against borders and private property. I suggest that it is important to attend to the infrastructural dimensions of migration and border regimes, as they can produce and regularize exclusion and conceal it from the conventional field of political discussion and legal contestation. At the same time, new infrastructures can prefigure better, more equitable worlds.
Spaces of Care: Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums, eds. Wayne Modest, Claudia Augustat. Verlag Bielefeld, Germany. Pp.25-38, 2023
How might we create an ethnographic museum in which the histories and afterlives of racist and co... more How might we create an ethnographic museum in which the histories and afterlives of racist and colonial violence become visible, and conversations about them become possible? To begin this experiment, I propose to add an object called 'wirewall' to this antiracist, anti-colonial ethnographic museum, as a way to render visible forms of oppression and violence (see fig. 1). We might say it is in the same category of objects already in the National Museum for Ethnology, in Leiden: for instance, we can liken it to the effigies made by the Sorongo, in the region of northwest Angola. These served several purposes, but one of them was to demarcate land boundaries. Dating from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, they were used to mark the crossroads between two areas. There are several kinds of effigies; for instance, there is one with a traditional male leopard cape, associated with vigour and power (see fig. 2). But there is also a figure of a mother and child, which, among other things, represents the source of life and the continuity of the clan. How are these similar to wirewall? It also marks land boundaries; it was designed to protect the border between two nation-states-the US and Mexico. But it does not represent life; it enacts a regime of death. We might be tempted to say it is a part of American culture. But it is more accurate to say that it is part of a global culture of incarceration. What might wirewall tell us about racism and colonial violence? How might it work in an ethnographic museum?
Borderlands, 2022
It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all s... more It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are far from static. This special issue tackles the challenge of thinking about mobility, not only in its individual instances where it is treated in self-enclosed containers, and not only in its usual contrast to place, ground, sedentarism, and static forms of being; but rather, in the terms of the generative forces created when multiple mobilities come together and cross paths, for better and for ill-in short, intersecting mobilities.
Borderlands, 2022
This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the domi... more This article traces three different political imaginaries about borders, suggesting that the dominant imaginary-the one of border walls, driven by a fear of invasion-is only one way to live in the world. The goal is to make space in our political imaginations to rethink how we live together, including thinking beyond nation-states as containers that keep people in or out. By first showing how the vision of invasion is built and maintained with intersecting transnational technologies and ideologies, I open the way to thinking otherwise. Second, I trace the counterpolitics of borders developed by artists and activists, resisting borders and walls, as they work towards the end goal of freedom of movement. Finally, I turn to more speculative visions; I argue that we need to create room for alter-visions or alterpolitics-parallel alternatives to the current political order, which differ from oppositional politics. To this end, I read across the fields of immunology and anthropology in order to open an alter-political imaginary based on xenophilia, rather than xenophobia.
Perspecta 54 (Yale Architecture), 2022
Co-authored with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Victoria Hattam. This is a co-written essay ab... more Co-authored with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Victoria Hattam. This is a co-written essay about the place of political imagination in scholarship and design.
The Politics of Care, in Contemporary Political Theory, 2021
to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice th... more to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive.
e Immigrant Defense Project’s Surveillance, Tech & Immigration Policing Project, and the Transnational Institute. , 2021
On January 20, 2021, his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order pausing t... more On January 20, 2021, his first day in office, President Biden issued an executive order pausing the remaining construction of the southern border wall initiated during the Trump administration. Soon after, the White House sent a bill to Congress, the US Citizenship Act of 2021, calling for the deployment of "smart technology" to "manage and secure the southern border." Among many leading Democratic and Republican politicians, there is a belief that a "smart" border-the expansive use of surveillance and monitoring technologies including cameras, drones, biometrics, and motion sensors-offers a humane alternative to Trump-era immigration policy. The Biden administration's US Citizenship Act of 2021, for example, calls for the deployment of "smart creativeplanetnetwork.com/government-video/sbinet-breaks-ground-in-michigan;
SIGNS, 2021
for their invaluable comments.
Ethnic and Racial Studies , 2021
We respond to prompts about the relationships between race, migration, and sexuality, as these in... more We respond to prompts about the relationships between race, migration, and sexuality, as these intersecting differences have been forced into the same frame by the violent practices of right-wing regimes, and brought into relief by Covid19. Even as we have long known that sexual politics are a way to govern bodies, and to distribute uneven states of vulnerability, we are seeing new incarnations of government. What we aim to point out is how people who are seen as “different” are being attacked, maimed, dispossessed and murdered. But perhaps more importantly, we insist on the specific nature of right-wing times because these regimes not only encourage attacks on people, but on the very idea that such people should exist, have rights and be recognized and understood; that there are areas of scholarship that center them, or areas of law that try to address the inequalities that dispossess them.
Open Democracy-OpEd, 2021
Co-authored with Sofya Aptekar
American Anthropologist, 2020
https://www.americananthropologist.org/2020/07/02/no-borders-in-the-time-of-covid-19/
World Records, vol 4, article 11: https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/04/11, 2020
Humanitarianism and Human Rights, 2020
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Articles by Miriam Ticktin
On January 20, 2021, his first day in office, US President Biden issued an executive order pausing the remaining construction of the southern border wall initiated during the Trump administration. Soon after, the White House sent a bill to Congress, the US Citizenship Act of 2021, calling for the deployment of “smart technology” to “manage and secure the southern border.” Under Biden’s blueprint, $1.2 billion would be allocated for border infrastructure including “modernization of land ports of entry, investments in modern border security technology and assets, and efforts to ensure the safe and humane treatment of migrants in CBP custody.”
Our new report shows that whether “smart” or not, all border policing shares a common goal: to control human beings and to deny entry to those deemed undesirable or undeserving. It highlight five harms caused by border policing:
-A boom in the border and surveillance industrial complex
-The growing policing of immigrants and their communities, the borderlands, and society on a global scale.
-Separation and undermining of families and communities.
-The maiming and killing of large numbers of border crossers.
-Exacerbation of socioeconomic inequality.