Visualizing Anti-Deterrence Geographies: Migrant-Activist Mobile Mapping and Collective Evidence-Making Strategies in the Aegean Sea
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Keywords: migration, visual methodologies, mobile mapping
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract
Authors:
Bea Abbott, University of Kentucky
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Abstract
Aesthetic strategies such as photography and mapping are an important medium through which bordering is enacted and contested at Europe’s external borders. People moving or attempting movement, state apparatuses working to control that movement, and various assemblages of NGOs, journalists, researchers, migrants, and activists, all use maps and images as part of the production of and struggle over border space. This paper explores some of the ways migrant-activist have used mobile maps and images to make visible and contest the deadly border geographies produced through policies and practices of migration deterrence. I look specifically at the image-making practices of the Maritime Organization for Follow-up and Rescue (MOFR), an organization of digital migrant-activists who in late 2015 and the early months of 2016 supported hundreds of migrant journeys across the Aegean Sea primarily by way of mapping and image-making correspondences over WhatsApp. Through an engagement with their Facebook archive, I argue that MOFR and those they corresponded with innovate collective evidence-making strategies that work to contest geographies of deterrence through creative aesthetic approaches to visualizing maritime border space.
Visualizing Anti-Deterrence Geographies: Migrant-Activist Mobile Mapping and Collective Evidence-Making Strategies in the Aegean Sea
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Paper Abstract