Resilience and necronormativity: EU migration control and the case of HIV positive, marginalized migrants from Poland in Berlin

Taking perspectives from resilience policy, security and urban governance that involve discussion on necropolitics, in this talk I illustrate complex processes that regulate access to rights and resources of Polish, HIV positive migrants in Berlin. As EU citizens in a “progressive” context of liberal Berlin, they are not deemed as an “enemy” or the “other” but as someone vulnerable in need of care but also a potential threat to the “healthy” part of the society. The conceptual toolkit from resilience research and urban governance enables to bring into the light the logic of exclusion of vulnerable population in bureaucratic, every-day operation and logic of post-liberal Western state. The case of two migrating, married Polish people being HIV positive and addicted in Berlin enables to depart from the common perspective of “deservingness” or “everyday bordering” in access to health care of migrants, but to highlight more complex division-making as those between deserving or victimized migrants and the repressive state.

Bio:
Pawel Lewicki studied at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Warsaw, gained his PhD in European Ethnology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and is currently assistant professor at the Chair for Comparative Social and Cultural Anthropology at the European University Viadrina in Frankfur (Oder). His research interests are East-West entanglements of race, sexuality and gender, post- and decolonial perspectives on Europeanization processes, HIV care and EU citizenship as well as entanglements of racism antisemitism and homophobia in Poland.

Polecana literatura:
Randi Gressgård (2017): The racialized death-politics of urban resilience governance, Social Identities, DOI: 10.1080/13504630.2017.1418605