Cripping the Polish-Belorussian border? People on the move, disability, and racialization in Eastern Europe

• In Event: Crip Elsewheres: Disability Worldmaking across Borders

Abstract

This presentation seeks to use the disability studies and crip theory toolkit to think of the recent (and ongoing) events in Eastern Europe, precisely, the push-backs of people on the move on the Polish-Belorussian border. The 2021 Polish governments, both right-wing and center-right, have been violently pushing away people trying to cross Polish-Belorussian border. The Polish border control denies the right to file for asylum and - literally - pushes back people into Belorussian territory thus prohibiting entrance into the EU. Very few people - of the thousands who attempted to cross the border - were legally allowed into Poland. Consequently, the Polish-Belorussian border has been increasingly militarized, and the government built a wall there to make the crossing even harder. So far there have been more than 80 deaths confirmed.
We think of the border both as a physical place but equally importantly a set of population management techniques producing disability through expulsion. We’ll rely on discourse analysis to unpack public domain accounts discussing the situation of the refugees crossing the Polish green border and will ask about the ways in which cripness, debility, and disability are present in these reports. We will ask how racialization (so far insufficiently analysed in the context of EE), migration and violence happening at the border are related to producing disability and debility. However, the analysis of the reports and the employment of Anglophone notions, such as cripness or debility, lead us to pose a question about the utility and legibility of the Western tools to conceptualize events taking place in other cultural, historical, and geographical contexts. What does “cripping elsewhere” convey?

Authors

• Agnieszka Król, Jagiellonian University Medical College

• Natalia Pamula, University of Warsaw