Description
This paper looks at how bordered affects are formed and reproduced in the relationship of railway infrastructure and practices of migration (and migration control). Focusing on the train line running from Šid (SRB), through Croatia (HRK), to Dobova (SLO), it asks how railways–as socio-spatial objects–are involved in both the anticipation and hope of forward movement, as well as the governing of (im)mobility, migrant racialisation, incarceration and deportation. Through testimonies of the Šid-Dobova line between 2015-2020, I explore how the potential and foreclosure of mobility can be part understood through the alignment of bodies in trains, among freight and under trains, in particular through the traces these bodies leave in their wake (Sharp 2016). I argue that attending to the positions of people on the move--as “humanitarian passengers”, “clandestine stowaways”, and “deportees”--highlights key aspects of the EUropean border regime, in particular how border enforcement articulates itself to corridors of capital, commodities and labour mobility. Using an affective approach to viapolitics (Walters 2015), the paper emphasises the relational and inter-object “accrual” (Ahmed 2004) of particular bordered affects within railway space, and the imprint of bodies on chains of governance, logistics and humanitarianism.
