Borders, Subjectivity, and Iconoclasm

Borders separating the global north from the global south have in recent years created an accelerated moment of control and confinement. This development has created new and contested borderlands that give rise to particular individual, social and political forms of struggle over mobility that informs experience and designates subjective categories like migrant, smuggler, or deportee. Recent anthropological approaches have reminded us that subjectivity has not always suggested a perspective on human life as focused on inner states and individual experience, but that being a subject also means to be subjected to the ruling powers that be, whether a monarch or state power. 

This workshop revisited the political dimension of subjectivity by bringing attention to how life-worlds and individual needs and desires are informed and challenged by particular socio-economic, political, and racial configurations. And how, in the expanded borderlands, the desire for mobility, physical as well as social and existential, is often viewed as transgressive. In fact, could migrant journeys be seen as acts of iconoclasm that challenge or tear down the dominating spatial imaginaries and therefore elicit especially hard measures? 

The workshop brought together Danish and Nordic researchers to discuss Borders, Subjectivity, and Iconoclasm at a time of restricted travelling due to COVID 19. It was organised around short presentations and roundtables, examining how borders both outside and within inform subjectivity, and how mobility creates mediated spectacles in the borderlands. 

Workshop participants

Anja Karlsson Franck, University of Gothenburg

Anja Simonsen, University of Copenhagen

Ayo Degett, University of Copenhagen and Danish Refugee Council

Christian Vium, Aarhus University

Eva Magdalena Stambøl, Freie Universität Berlin

Hans Lucht, DIIS

Ida Marie Savio Vammen, DIIS

Karen Fog Olwig, University of Copenhagen

Karen Waltorp, University of Copenhagen

Katrine Syppli Kohl, University of Copenhagen

Line Richter, University of Copenhagen

Lotte Pelckmans, University of Copenhagen

Marie Sandberg, University of Copenhagen

Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Amnesty International Denmark

Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, DIIS

Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, DIIS

Sofie Henriksen, DIIS

Susan Whyte, University of Copenhagen