Martina Tazzioli: Unmaking Migrant Life. Technologies of Suffocation in Europe [EN]

Lecture Series FORCED MIGRATION
25 November 2026, 2:15-3:45 pm CET [Please note: different time!]

online

Martina Tazzioli (University of Bologna )
Unmaking Migrant Life. Technologies of Suffocation in Europe [EN]

This presentation argues that nowadays, in order to tackle migrants’ unruly presence, state authorities, systematically resort to what I call “technologies of suffocation”, meaning by that a range of administrative and spatial tactics apt at suffocating migrants’ lives, making them sick and tearing down their collective spaces of liveability. Technologies of suffocation work by dismantling life-support infrastructures and by hampering migrants from carrying on their social reproduction activities. By life-support infrastructures I refer to the spaces and conditions of liveability that sustain social reproduction activities and collective formations, as well as that enable cultivating aspirations. An insight into life-support infrastructures foregrounds the power’s hold over lives that migrant persons are subjected to and reveals that migrants are disrupted not only in their movements: rather, their lives are choked and, relatedly, their horizon of aspirations is also foreclosed. Focusing on the Greek context, as well as on key border-zones in Europe, such as the French-Italian frontier, the presentation interrogates what a critique of the border regime should look like today, in the face of circuits of exploitation and subjugation that are enhanced through a crisis of and struggles over social reproduction activities.

Martina Tazzioli is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on migration and borders in Southern Europe and Mediterranean region. Before joining the University of Bologna, she was Reader in the Politics department at Goldsmiths and Lecturer in Geography at Swansea University. She has a background in political philosophy (University of Pisa). She is the author of "Border abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles" (2023). "The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders" (2019), "Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings" (2015) and co-author of "Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration" (2016). Her forthcoming book is entitled "The Unmaking of Migrant Life. Technologies of Suffocation in Europe" (Bristol University Press, 2027).

Please register here once for all online events in the ‘Forced Migration’ lecture series:
https://forms.europa-uni.de/form/alias/EUV/forced-migration-lecture-series/

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FORCED MIGRATION – Lecture Series, Winter Semester 2026/2027

The lecture series is organised within the framework of B/ORDERS IN MOTION and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on forced migration, borders, asylum, and refugee reception. It examines how experiences of displacement are shaped by immigration and asylum regimes, legal insecurity, racialisation, gendered and intersectional inequalities, and changing infrastructures of border control and reception.

Combining theoretical debate with empirical research and perspectives from policy, activism, and practice, the series addresses border externalisation and violence, differentiated forms of vulnerability and protection, refugee agency and collective action, and the everyday negotiation of institutional constraints. It also considers questions of local reception, participation, and support, connecting wider debates on European migration governance with experiences and practices in specific national and local contexts.