Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Building on the work of Isin (2018), this paper sets an agenda that expands the concept of ‘transversal configurations’ and puts it into practice to investigate relationships between political subjectivity and space. We understand transversal configurations to be an open-ended, expansive way of understanding relations between people, politics and space, which challenges and does not re-produce the bounded territorial political subjectivities tied to forms of sedentarism for instance nation-state, empire, supranational institutions, such as citizenship or other forms of political and community membership. In this way, we contribute to recent debates in critical migration studies concerned with resisting methodological nationalism by rethinking fixed spatial imaginary of political subjectivities through transversal configurations. Transversal configuration are a doing not a being. The cases discussed in this work demonstrate how mobile people can build various connections across time and space in a way that demonstrates the shared nature of their struggles. That is, they develop transversal configurations. Transversal configuration then are forms of relationality rather than a set political identity. One cannot be a transversal configuration. One can, however, act within or develop a transversal configuration in ways which re-shape the political terrain.