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.
