Introduction to Special Section ‘Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities’

Abstract

This Special Section interrogates the interrelationships between mobilities infrastructures and notions of injustice across multiple empirical settings regarding regimes of migration and border movements of peripheralized communities. Most readings of infrastructure imply fixity and permanence and suggest neutral mediations of mobility. This collection, in contrast, examines how, in fact, infrastructural forms interpret, translate and paraphraseand and in doing so, generate plural possibilities of injustice and justice. Through extending debates in relation to the interaction of human and tangible infrastructures, we interrogate how this dimension is key in understanding the materialization of injustice today, both within and across international borders. Interrogating these interconnections has implications not just for the steady international streams of marginalised labour migrants and immigrants, but also for increasing numbers of refugee populations seeking asylum and work across borders. In bringing conceptualizations of injustice to anthropocentric understandings of infrastructure, to generate more ontologically inclusive understandings of laws, bureaucracy, borders and networks of international mobility as central actors in shaping possibilities for justice, as well as entrenching or exacerbating existing forms of inequality.