Nomadic (counter)mapping

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• GGP: Global Governance Programme

The seminar explores an agenda of motioning the politics of (in)security by analysing how techniques of mapping migration work within and upon security-migration nexuses. Motioning the politics of (in)security comes to the question of security and migration by focusing on how mapping methods produce particular conceptions of movement in producing spatial knowledge and artefacts. More specifically, the seminar reflects on how taking a Lucretian point of view that understands life and matter as essentially in motion transmutes the international and humanitarian security conceptions of movement-space through which migration and its regulatory possibilities are imagined and conducted. To that purpose, the seminar discusses a distinctive mapping mode, nomadic counter-mapping, which disrupts cartographic practices working with sedentarising grids and network conceptions of movement. Reading migration-security nexuses through debates and practices of counter-mapping places ‘mapping’ directly in a politicised context of struggles, contestations, and disagreements over representations and narrations of migration and modes of governing it.