Presentations by dr. Mariangela Veikou and dr. Heleen Janssen.
Chair: prof.dr. Caroline Nevejan.
(All participants agreed on filming and publishing the meeting on openresearch).
Digitalisation is changing the way how we define and organize our society, and even citizenship. At the workshop we are looking to see how Digital Citizenship may provide a range of possibilities for inclusivity, other than merely the inherent challenges.
NIAS Digital Urban Citizen fellows dr. Mariangela Veikou and dr. Heleen Janssen examine how the use of digital technologies plays out in the real world. Accessing digital technologies is only part of the problem of our unequal world. From the very notion of citizenship and concerns on equity to the government’s use of digital data generated by private sectors or old structures, our work explores how the use of digital technology might directly or indirectly affect individuals, communities, and the (local) government itself.
Through theoretical and methodological explorations of contemporary law, political philosophy, social theory, interviews and fieldwork research, we study how digitalisation impacts current structures of participation and inclusivity.
Specifically, we explore how: (1) digital tools may shape the way we find solutions or make political decisions over inclusivity in society on sectors traditionally considered sensitive and unbreachable, such as citizenship and nationhood; and (2) data held by private sectors could be shared responsibly with the municipality, thereby respecting the rights and interests of citizens and private sector, respectively.
This meeting took place on March 23rd 2023 at the DataLab Amsterdam.
Presentations by dr. Mariangela Veikou and dr. Heleen Janssen.
Chair: prof.dr. Caroline Nevejan.
(All participants agreed on filming and publishing the meeting on openresearch).
Onderzoeksvoorstel van Mariangela Veikou voor het NIAS Digital Urban Citizen fellowship.
Auteur: Mariangela Veikou
The current pandemic is sustained in dichotomies and distancing, as most of us awkwardly have recently experienced. Moreover, COVID-19 has definitely put the spotlight on social inequalities that are underpinning our society and it has highlighted the escalation of the state surveillance capability and new forms of oppression too. The discrimination ingrained in our societies, built on a historically defined regime of racialized oppression and structural disadvantage of racialized citizens and migrants, was produced well before the coronavirus, but it is now casting a different shade, reinforcing forms of exclusions, highlighting the pandemic as a political issue. Hence, this paper addresses a range of political perspectives of the lived experiences in and through social space with examples of narratives in language which capture the everyday political experiences of the pandemic within Europe. The kind of language used and its profound effect on the growing discourse regarding COVID-19 is the main focus in this paper. I here explore the intertwining of language and politics during the pandemic and bring out the countervailing narratives that seem to be in constant tension. I then ask where this takes us, not only in terms of scholarship and expansion of knowledge, but also with a pragmatic edge to it, trying to figure out how is it possible for us to achieve some sort of cognitive shift in our approach in order to learn from this challenge and from this new perspective. Methodologically, as well as looking at existing data, references to attitudes in general are made. A theoretical discussion on migration and language, and the kind of intersection between them, is offered, from the point of view of critical theory, before pointing to the metaphors used, the implications they allow, and how all these fit together, in the form of a concluding discussion. Metaphor or not, the power of language in its ramifications of articulations about the pandemic and the idea of distance underlines COVID-19 as a deeply political issue.
Veikou, Mariangela. 2022. COVID-19 Point Blank: Language, Migration, and the Pandemic as a
Political Issue. Social Sciences 11: 35.
This blog brings together perspectives of race and the politics of solidarity in the New Migration and Asylum Pact (New Pact). Furthermore, this contribution makes some room for analogies to be drawn between such events as the renewed discussion on the criminalization of migration and the recent impositions on rights and liberties that governments are imposing upon citizens since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.
The way solidarity has been managed remains a controversial issue, especially from a humanistic perspective. As it stands, the New Pact makes no real mention of the rights of refugees and migrants, nor does it address with clarity their protection challenges. Under the New Pact some steps might have been taken to reverse the bleak conditions of the past regime. In fact, these conditions are amplified without offering relief measures.
With regards to the section on solidarity in the Pact, we need to unpack the meaning of solidarity, as it plays out in different ways. For example, we are looking at two kinds of problems: Firstly, with regards to the demand for a more effective enforcement strategy, it brought about the introduction of a so called ‘solidarity à la carte’, in the sense that the states ‘divide up tasks between them - instead of the previous one-size-fits-all approach’ (Karageorgiou & Gauci, 2019). Thus, essentially, it is a solidarity shown exclusively to members states between themselves and not a solidarity shown to individuals and in particular migrants. It is a solidarity based on exclusion, used for power and community building. The member states, here again, aim at rationalizing the concentration and accumulation of their privilege and justifying it.
Secondly, under the umbrella of the principle of solidarity, the management of migration continues, to a large extent, to be outsourced to third-parties. While these externalized operations effectively may contain migration en masse, they also sustain and highlight the widespread abuses on migrants. In that sense, the solidarity section of the Pact does little, if anything, to change the current narrative on migration with its dehumanizing and racialized policies. It is compounded with policies that are put in place to target control, securitization and safety. There are no references of any specific focus on how racism feeds into these toxic security-focused narratives. This remains a major concern.
Therefore, I would also like to focus on another term which is of importance in this regard: racism. The Pact could have sparked and addressed demands of justice and equality and offered the potential to create important changes in the way migration and asylum are regulated and governed. Yet, it reads as if coming from the established culture of, essentially, experimentation on refugees and migrants. The Pact is mirroring again a system of exclusion (i.e., racialized implementations in government provisions on detention and asylum, border security prioritized over access to asylum, etc.). We need to face up to the fact that there are strong elements of how racism is playing out in it.
It is interesting to see how racism complicates the conversations on migration and asylum in Europe still today. The Pact legitimizes the decision the EU member States took not to save refugees. Not only that, but the discourse is pushing through that this decision has become ‘normal’. What are the functions of normalizing such decision making? Among the member states, the political rhetoric is all about a ‘shameless normalisation’ of exclusion from basic rights, to use the term explained in the recent work of Ruth Wodak (2020), which signals that ‘anything goes’ in dealing with refugees. Ideologies and political content which were tabooed before, are being openly spoken in the political agenda of today and repeated, thus normalized. About solidarity, what we have come to see is that the Pact has taken over the conservative discourse of exclusion and is working towards its normalization. The way in which the morality of solidarity and anti-racism is processed politically in the Pact, does not seem to be any different from the previous regime.
To link it with the recent pandemic management in Europe, we observe that social inequalities are revealed and exposed even more during these times. We can draw an analogy between the rights of citizens trumped in the pandemic and the rights of migrants controlled by a state border migration regime. We can notice the following: governments rushing to legislate as a first response, public protests to imposed restrictions on civil liberties, and the closing of borders. The legitimizing discourse is that we need to be concerned about our own vulnerable people and we do not have room or resources to take in others.
Having been encouraged for so long in our societies to think as ‘individuals’, Covid-19 and, especially, the vaccine logic are inviting us to think that we are all in this together. But this is not the case in practice. The spirit of solidarity that is expected of people in the pandemic is dismissed for a logic that prioritizes a select few. The protection that people would require as the consequences of this pandemic are felt are not underwritten by supportive governments. Many people are, simply and readily, cast aside. This is reminiscent of the approach to migration with the imposed conditions and the restrictive regime for migrants on their rights and freedoms. Consider, too, that the ‘corona acts’ have been passed in many cases practically within a single day by European governments, while measures in response to migration emergencies have been dragged out excruciatingly for many years with heavy feet.
We urgently need a more humane and accountable approach to migration. It remains unclear if the EU is intending to address the reality of the underlying systems of exclusion and racism as a dominant characteristic of it with this new migration Pact. It is vital that we ask these kinds of hard questions because we need to aspire to politics as a process and engagement that plays out and transforms in ways that are in solidarity and enhancing for human rights and values.
Author: Mariangela Veikou.
This article originates from the website Human Rights Here.
This paper takes as its starting point the work of Adbelmalek Sayad (2004), and especially the notion of immigration as the trauma of dou- ble absence. In his influential account, Sayad (2004, p. 141) argues that migration creates a rupture and introduces disorder in the per- son. Sayad's sociology of migration uses 'double absence' as the key to explain that Immigrants who leave their home country create a social, personal and political vold at home; in addition, they occupy a kind of liminal space in their host countries, where they are not full members. This metaphor of double absence is apt in capturing the dynamics of migration and its effects on belonging. However, eager to show the deficits of migration, Sayad may have neglected the different ways in which immigrants seek to either com- pensate for their absence or to make their presence felt, by acquiring a new sense of belonging or keeping old ones. In addition, since the time of Sayad's research in the mid-1980s, drastic changes in media technologies have led to a redefinition of presence in ways that make It less dependent on physical location (Meyrowitz 1985). The explosion of social media, understood as social precisely because of their ability to connect people, led to a renewed problem concerning the issue of presence: How is the binary of absence/presence redefined in practice by Immigrants? How might this affect their personal, social and polit- Ical lives and especially their sense of belonging? Finally, how do new forms of presence articulate belongings to new forms of collectivities, such as networks? What kind of networks emerge concomitantly with social media presence and use? This paper will examine such questions and attempt to provide some answers in what follows.
2015 “Rethinking Belonging in the Era of Social Media: Migration and Presence.” Wouter de Been, Payal Arora and Mireille Hildebrandt (eds). Crossroads in New Media, Identity and Law.
The societal transformations reflecting the increased visibility of migrants in European societies have prompted reconsideration of the theoretical concepts used to analyse and model migrant-host society relationships. Do the principles of concepts such as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘integration’ fit the empirical examples that are meant to illustrate? The paper presents the first set of empirical results of a project designed to study questions of migrant integration by retrieving illustrative examples of experiences in this domain, drawn from Amsterdam. Much depends upon what happens at the local level and attention to non-state dimensions of integration – such as these that take place at the city neighbourhood level – could
illuminate the workings of integration in practice. The study, paying a great deal of attention to the intimate stories of women migrants from North Africa, addresses issues to do with their trajectories of adaptation in Amsterdam. The divergent experiences (and backgrounds) of these migrant women reveal the current city–policy structures and present-day cultures of the settled migrant and native populations as they unfold in practice in everyday life. Following the life experiences of migrants is perhaps one of the best ways of gaining a perspective on the integration model of the society, the processes of ‘integration from below’ so to speak.
Veikou, M. (2013). Integration: a hot button issue. Contextualising Multiculturalism and Integration in Amsterdam. Diversities, 15(1), 51-66.
European societies are effectively witnessing a growing refugee crisis in tandem with the ongoing economic crisis in recent years. Within this climate, migration is at risk of being seen more than ever before as an additional ‘burden’ that societies have to ‘carry’ and it is sometimes even questioned why it should be accommodated or respected at all. This paper draws on empirical research from Greece to examine
changing European societies, with a particular focus on how the crisis is affecting the most vulnerable members of society, the stateless children and women migrants and refugees.
Mariangela Veikou (2017) Back to Basics: Stateless Women and Children in Greece, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 19:5, 557-570, DOI: 10.1080/19448953.2017.1296261
This article develops a perspective on African migrant integration, reflecting on the ‘visualization’ of migrant experience. It formulates some considerations on how integration of migrants can be captured, drawing on empirical material from street photography in modern-day Greece. The main research question concerns the role of visual images as sites for the construction and depiction of social difference. In that sense, their meaning goes beyond their content and they act as visual representations of discourses. The paper addresses this issue through a focus on local aspects of integration of sub-Saharan African migrants in the city centre of Athens. Specifically it looks at three themes related to discourses on migrant integration in today’s economic crisis: (1) the physical and social environment of marginalization, (2) the migrant body and (3) the fear of the migrant. On the basis of the findings a synthesis is attempted of several parallel existing representations in discourses about African migration. The synthesis betrays the ongoing struggle between, on the one hand, the dominant structures that the state creates to deal with their presence and, on the other, the migrant strategies for adaptation and inclusion, which in turn sustain
the mechanisms and form integration takes in this context.
Mariangela Veikou (2016) Economic Crisis and Migration, Cultural Studies, 30:1, 147-172, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2014.974641