Mediating Mobility: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State

Natasha Raheja; Elizabeth Challinor

Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) will present on ‘Mediating mobility: Migration and brokerage at the borders of the State’. Elizabeth Challinor (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) will act as the discussant.

When: 21 May 2021 / 2.00-3.30 pm CET

Link: https://zoom.us/j/93210372616pwd=dTZZ…

ID: 93210372616
Password: 4JzWZ6

Abstract

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants and street-level, Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations offer an empirical counter-narrative to the Indian state’s emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state-subject relations. Though computer typists are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are not always perceptible or acknowledged. Officers’ strategies of mediation obscure and expose middlemen in ways that entangle and disentangle brokerage as both part of, and distinct from, the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. Officers’ shifting recognition of brokerage produces the fuzziness of the Indian state’s edges. Through the ambiguous ubiquity of their acts of mediation, middlemen come to embody the blurriness of where the state begins and ends.

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Here is the full schedule of the webinar series.

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This article is peer reviewed. See our review guidelines.

Cite this article as: Raheja, Natasha & Elizabeth Challinor. May 2021. 'Mediating Mobility: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State'. Allegra Lab. https://allegralaboratory.net/mediating-mobility-migration-and-brokerage-at-the-borders-of-the-state/

About The Authors

Natasha Raheja

Natasha Raheja is a visual and legal anthropologist working as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her current writing and film projects explore questions of migration, citizenship, and majoritarianism in South Asia. She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled From Minority to Majority: Pakistani Hindu Claims to Indian Citizenship and the companion documentary film How many Passports? She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU (2018), and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Cultures and Languages from UT Austin (2008; 2010)

Elizabeth Challinor

Elizabeth Challinor is a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FCSH) at the New University of Lisbon where she is currently conducting research on refugee reception and integration in Portugal within the ambit of a project led by Gabriele de Angelis, financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/FER -ETC/30378/2017). Her other areas of interest include migration, public policies and development anthropology. She has published on the anthropology of development in Cape Verde, on migrant mothering, gender, citizenship and identity issues amidst Cape Verdean students in Portugal and her emerging work focuses on the legal consciousness of migrants and refugees in Portugal.