Mobility and the Nation:
Skins, Machines and Complex Systems

Nikos Papastergiadis

Origin: Static Issue 02
Content: PDF

"This essay re-examines the public fears of invasion at the time of heightened anxiety over terrorist attacks and in light of the ongoing refugee crisis. It considers how discourses on the nation-state and mobility have been confined to an oppositional model. The twin pillars of micro-agency and macro-structuralism that have supported the prevailing sociological theories of migration present the nation-state as a bounded system. By identifying the fear of external agents and the ambivalence towards mobility, this essay traces a secret complicity between theories of migration and the preservation of the nation-state as a unified and exclusionary social system. The global flows and local affiliations of contemporary society are better grasped through complex systems theory, which transcends the oppositional logic of belonging and movement..."

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Contributor:

Nikos Papastergiadis is a Reader at the University of Melbourne. His most recent publications include Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and Everyday, Rivers Oram Press, London, 2006 and co-editor with Scott McQuire, Empires, Ruins and Networks, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2005. He is currenlty writing a book called The Invasion Complex.

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