24/2 - Liefern. Logistiken, Daten und Politiken

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Flattening the Map: How Human Movement is Turned Into a Logistical Problem; the Cases of Asylum and Humanitarian Relief
Pfeifer, Michelle; Ward, Patricia (2024) , S. 81-99
Why is human movement increasingly conceived of as a logistical problem? Global forms of human movement have been occurring for centuries, but popular dis- course and policies often construct contemporary human movement as excep- tional: an unprecedented global problem that requires new techniques of management and logistics. Scholarship situates logistics as a site that articulates social relations of power and differentiates human worth. In this paper, we ask how human movement becomes transformed into a logistical matter in the first place. Following calls within critical logistics scholarship to not just follow contain- ers but also techniques like containment, this paper considers mapping techniques that transform human movement into problems viewed through a logistical lens. We explore these mapping techniques in the context of transnational humanitari- an response operations and EU asylum procedures. We find that mapping tech- niques visibly construct humans on the move as issues of circulation and distribu- tion: a logistical framing which invisibilizes the figure(s) of the human(s) situated in these circulations and distributions. At the same time, we find that mapping tech- niques both make and unmake human movement because mapping imbues (and is imbued with) ambivalent, ever-changing directional and hierarchical assumptions and logics related to the configuration and organization of social relations. We ar- gue that it is this very differentiation of humanity that logistification – through techniques of mapping – produces and enacts: the value and attention to certain human lives versus others based on logistics.

Browsing 24/2 - Liefern. Logistiken, Daten und Politiken by Author "Ward, Patricia"

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