Materials of Solidarity: On Alternative Infrastructures of Care

• In Event: Digital Border Practices

Abstract

This paper explores interconnected practices of material transformation in communities of migrants. I use the notion of alternative infrastructures to study the everyday struggles of migrants and the role of actor-networks of care. I draw on ethnographic inputs from Athens and Colombia to describe the voices usually neglected due to methodological nationalism assembling post-conflict and governmental solidarity. Here, non-digital practices like sewing in workshops and commemorating in streets become material arrangements challenging instituted and digital infrastructures of migration control. Everyday crafting practices enact networks of care that coexist with the deployment of technologies of registration and control. Understanding this coexistence might help those interested in how migrants reconstruct affective relations and trespass the sociotechnical boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship. Thereby, I argue in favor of exploring an angle from infrastructure studies regarding the non-instituted ontologies of solidarity and psychosocial support from migrants themselves. The latter attempt is in line with STS’s calls for generalizing symmetry to objects, non-instituted innovation and the alternative materiality of everyday experience.

Author

• Fredy Mora-Gámez, Linköping University, Tema-T (Tema Technology and Social Change)