Abstract
ABSTRACT Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with Egyptians in Cairo and Amsterdam, 1 along with interviews conducted for our podcast de Verbranders, in this paper, we describe the activities in which people engage as they strive to cross borders meant to keep them out and settle in places designed to exclude and subordinate them. We term these activities ‘mobility work’ arguing that wherever borders place obstacles between people and the lives they aspire to lead, there is also the work of overcoming these obstacles. In theorising mobility work, we pay attention to what people do as they encounter and surmount borders, rather than the identities imposed upon them by borders, incorporating insights from feminist scholarship on reproductive labour to grapple with the scope and depth of this work. Empirically, we observe that mobility work is unequally distributed, encompasses both legalised and illegalised activities, and is carried out individually and collectively. It multiplies as borders proliferate, interlocking in intricate ways with nationality, race, gender, class, age, and ability. Nonetheless, even as restrictions on mobility deepen and rearticulate these inequalities and shape self-identifications, our study also sheds light on people’s waywardness as they choose to live.
Published Version
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