Agenda

VERONICA FERRERI
Ca’ Foscari Università Venezia e Humboldt University (CARMAH)
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A Scattered Archive of War and Migration: people, documents, care and other stories between Syria and Europe

Abstract
Identity documents and other legal papers are fundamental for migrants and refugees to navigate bureaucratic apparatuses in the country of displacement and asylum. As a tool of control and legibility, some of these artefacts define the thin line between legality and illegality, protection and exclusion. However, in wartime Syria, the value of these documents exceeds this legal and political dimension as these papers become entangled with –and a constitutive part of– Syrians’ life experience of war and migration. In my ethnographic encounters with these documents both in Lebanon (2014-2019) and Germany (2018-2020), Syrians treat and preserve these artefacts with care –at times with secrecy–, even when their legal validity expired. In informal settlements, these documents were laminated to protect them from precarious living conditions including fires and floods. In Germany, they were stored in bundles and plastic folders as something sacred. As papers, like people, circulate and cross borders, they also store different forms of knowledge and different political, social and even intimate values and meanings. As these documents become imbricated with Syrians’ lifeworld, the ever-changing value of documents and legal papers produced an archive of war and migration distant from methodological nationalism and the national order of things and, yet, still rooted in the political economy of papers inside Syria in times of war.

Partecipazione libera - Seminario valido per il tirocinio DEA/ACEL.
Coordinatrice: Franca Tamisari: tamisari@unive.it