Event Details

Professor Elena Raviola (Gothenburg University) will present in this OWT research seminar.

This paper focuses on borders as an urgent and consequential object of politics and organizing. More specifically, it investigates how the politics of liminality that manifest at the national borders is infrastructured. While liminality has often been studied as an experiential or symbolic condition, we shift the analytical focus to how it is materially and organizationally produced through processes of infrastructuring. Drawing on an ethnographically-inspired, multi-sited study of the Norway–Sweden and Sweden–Denmark borders, we investigate how legal, technological, and organizational infrastructures work together to materialize the evolving politics of liminality and transform borders from lines of passage, primarily aimed at filtering migration, into zones of (datafied) transition, primarily aimed at filtering criminality. We analyze three interrelated processes: the fabrication of law, the implementation of epistemic technologies, and the sharing of formal and informal organizing across borders. Our study shows how the contemporary infrastructuring of politics of liminality (at the borders) implies a spatial and temporal expansion of liminality in three main facets. First, through the practical fabrication of law, the space of liminality is expanded into zones where certain legal categories are suspended. Secondly, through the datafication of passages, the time of liminality is expanded because data persist, are shared and can be reanalyzed retroactively. Liminal transition might thus also be reversed. Thirdly, the spatial and temporal expansion of liminality transforms it into space-time moments in which it appears in unforeseeable ways. The paper contributes to organization studies by developing an infrastructural perspective on liminality as a political and organizational achievement and by inviting further attention of organizational scholars to borders as an urgent and highly consequential political phenomenon.