Segregated zones of living: refugee camps, asylum centers, ghettos

In the modern world, global flows of voluntary and involuntary migrants have produced new forms of segregated zones of living whose main purpose is, as demonstrated by Michel Agier, “managing undesirables”. These new and old forms of incarceration are either enforced by outside agencies such as in the refugee camp, through systemic discrimination in the ghetto or by temporary detention and isolation in asylum centers. These are not traditional environments, but artificial “Nowherevilles” and “Non-Places” seeking to contain, manage and control surplus populations – those we do not need or cannot otherwise control. Typologically diverse, camps, ghettos and asylum centers are all marked by insecurity, surveillance and segregation where residents live in a what could be called a “permanent state of emergency”. This also includes other forms of “biopolitical” spaces such as the hyperghetto, inner-city slums and (concentration) camps theorized by scholars such as Loïc Wacquant, Philippe Bourgois and Giorgio Agamben.

This thematic area invites empirically grounded contributions from all disciplines that examine one or more of these Foucauldian “crisis heterotopias”; the spaces where residents remain socially and physically segregated from majority society. In particular we invite contributions that critically examine heterotopias; their histories, narratives, production, modes of governance, legality and livelihoods.