The need to problematize migration has never been more urgent. Pervasive austerity policies have, unsurprisingly, been unable to achieve their stated aims of stopping immigration. Instead, they have systematically under-resourced migration infrastructure and implemented policies and programs that increasingly isolate newcomers and remove or further complicate paths to inclusion. As a result, social relations beyond the state have become increasingly important as both an alternative and necessity to survive state abandonment and vulnerablization. Thinking from these relations offers the opportunity to simultaneously provincialize the state and offer a finer-grained account of the violence, predation, inclusions, and possibilities at its margins, frontiers, and outsides. This conference aims to bring together diverse perspectives that dwell in the particular, think through the specific, and offer thick description of migration between state and non-state life. Our focus departs from this vital space of contestation. When states deal with migration, they rely on constructing and reproducing regimes of classification. These can be both juridical dichotomies - like those between citizen and foreigner, economic migrant or political refugee, regular and irregular, or criminal and victim - and more qualitative assessments - like those between deserving and undeserving, familiar and strange, or trustworthy and suspect. Meanwhile, the state’s abstract categories are always in contrast with the much more ambiguous complexity of social relations. Understanding contemporary migration requires attention to the way state and non-state, or with more nuance "state-like and state-dislike" relations and institutions are not separate, but entangled fields of relations that interact through moments of subsumption, symbiosis, subversion. We invite to analyze the entanglement of official classifications and life-as-lived in the context of migration and human mobility. What happens to practices, poetics, and grammars of migration at points of encounter between state and non-state relations? Authors across disciplines and those outside of academic institutions (eg, but not limited to: activists, artists, etc.) are encouraged to share their points of view. 

See the Program of the Conference or download it.