Choreographies of Resistance

In its close attention to the roles of bodies and events, the project is commendable for both scope and originality, and for the lines of novel scholarship that it opens…. Choreographies of Resistance offers a valuable contribution to critical scholarship. * Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography *
Politics is enacted corporeally. As a result, everyday acts and mundane encounters become important for understanding how migrants obstruct, redirect, and disrupt the functioning of the laws, policies, agencies, and authorities that attempt to govern their lives. By demonstrating how the performance of political subjectivity is achieved through bodily movements, Choreographies of Resistance makes a highly original contribution to the growing literature on the political agency of migrants and refugees. It leaves one wondering why choreography (with its emphasis on space, movement, and relationality) hasn’t already been applied as an analytic to study the politics of mobility. -- Peter Nyers, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, McMaster University
By developing the notion of mobility as choreography, this book offers a truly original take on the governance of migration in Europe. It is particularly powerful in its reconceptualisation of governance and resistance through an ontology of mobility. Starting with bodies as relational, mobile and multiple rather than preconstituted individuals, the book brings to light the disruptive and political potential of bodies in situations seemingly overdetermined by their regulation. -- Leonie Ansems de Vries, Lecturer in International Relations, Department of War Studies, King's College London
Choreographies of Resistance enlivens worlds of resistance in the mundane and miniscule moments and events through which asylum seekers, migrant workers and Roma beggars encounter and navigate the everyday in Finland. The authors show how agency manifests in bodies, without intentionality, but in ways that disturb the smooth functioning of governance. This eloquent volume reconsiders power, agency and resistance in relational terms and takes its place among emerging work that pioneers new materialist approaches to Citizenship and Border Studies. For those of us struggling to understand whether and how violent border regimes will come undone, Choreographies of Resistance provides a provocative and challenging account of the political in small things. -- Anne McNevin, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School, New York