Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the foregrounding of migrant activism through a photovoice project that emerged organically from groups of undocumented South Asian migrant men in Greece. It argues that this collective creative action against the criminalization of migrant ‘illegality’ constitutes an active act of citizenship that contests, from below, exclusionary citizenship rights and formal modes of inclusion into the body politic of a nation state. Isin’s concept of ‘activist citizen’ (2008) allows us to interpret migrant participation as a creative political mobilization that challenged their formal citizenship exclusion. The act of becoming intentionally visible through photo-taking and the multimedia installation allowed them to undertake constructive resistance against their forced invisibility and migrant abjectness. By representing themselves as empowered activist-citizens, and by using their photos, videos, and texts as evidentiary material, the undocumented migrant workers sought to destabilize dominant imaginaries and discourses that present them as fearful, deviant masculine others.

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