 Okay, I think we're ready to start. Here she is. Excellent, great. Oh wow, this is in silence, that is great, excellent. Okay, well welcome everyone. I'm John DeWalloy of the Association of Research and Graduate in the Faculty of Public Affairs. Many of you know me and I'm so glad to welcome so many of you back and everyone here to an edition of FPA Author Meets Readers. Thanks for coming. That's right, yeah. Before we go further, I do want to as always in our events to acknowledge that Carlton University, the land that Carlton University is located on, the land that we're on right here at Irene's Pub, is of course the traditional unceded territory of the O'Gonquan Peoples. And at all our events we always try and recognize that. Land acknowledgments are a very common thing these days, but I do think it is important each time to reflect on the land in which the university has built the traditional inhabitants of that land that has never been ceded. And the responsibilities, in my view, particularly of post-secondary institutions, are to further reconciliation between Canada and Indigenous peoples. We always try to acknowledge that each time in each one of our events. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this night where again as always in FPA we feature one of the many books by our faculty. We produce a lot of books in the faculty and for years now we've done Author Meets Readers here at Irene's Pub. The chance to feature the books, to hear from the authors and to hear from the readers about the book can have a great discussion. I also want to mention if you have noticed that, of course, the book tonight is for sale at the back. Octopus Books is our partner and they're always happy to sell their copy just during the event. If you feel like getting up and going back and buying a copy, you do that. Just don't feel any hesitation at all. So tonight's book is Via Politics, Borders Migration and the Power of Locomotion. There are three authors. Of course you have one here tonight. This is the International Collaboration. So I'm just going to introduce the one author who's with me here is William Walters. William, of course, is a professor of political science and sociology. I've always pleased to have William as my colleague in the Department of Political Science. I'm also glad to see a number of his sociology and fast colleagues here tonight as well. I get to read the bios of each person here. Now William, I have to say if you're a regular Author Meets Readers event you may say, hey, didn't William author Meets Readers event a year or two ago? Yeah, he did for another book. And as well I might add that tonight's book is not his newest book. He actually has an even newer one that the Co-ed and Handbook of Governmentality. He previously did State Sequencing and Security, reconfiguring the covert imaginary and William has many other books out there, many other publications and things. I might add also just for five years from 2017 to 2022 he directed the Air Deportation Project, multi-country inquiry into the aerogeographies of forced removal and explosion in and from Europe. So I'm very pleased to have had William as my colleague for many years in Department of Political Science. His productivity is tremendous. His citation count is enormous. And he's also just my coolest colleague. I've always wanted to be cool as William. I've never ever been able to. So I was really glad to have William with us here tonight. I also want to introduce the two other individuals that have joined us tonight to be the readers tonight. First, that's Philippe Kraut. Philippe is an Associate Professor in Political Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa. His research interests are in borders and migration, critical security studies in African politics. He's also going to research around issues related to politics and surveillance and privacy for diverse audiences. Before he came to the University of Ottawa, he was a lecturer at the University of York and a research fellow at the University of Sheffield. As well, I want to introduce Asar Masumi, who's an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, the seventh floor, one floor up from Political Science. There, she studies the politics of state-controlled refugee protection, as well as interfacing in historical change, alternative historiographies, and embodied memory. She has a book coming up soon with the University of British Columbia Press on multi-method geological research on Canadian refugee protection. She has a lot of other things going on. Her research has been published from peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on sex and sovereignty, limitations of feminist legal change, race and neoliberalism, and state multiculturalism. She's a community-engaged researcher with commitment to social justice and a member of the Canadian Council for Refugees. These are just the short biographies. These people were so glad to have them with us tonight. I'm now going to stop talking and I'm going to turn it over to William Walters, the author, to talk about the politics. Well, thank you very much, Jonathan, for that kind introduction and those kind words. Thank you very much to my co-presenters here and thank you to Moira for organizing and Karen for the motion. So the day got up to a bad start, you know, when I woke up and heard that Henry Kissinger and Shane McGowan had died and I thought, well, there goes the chances for peace in the Middle East, but then maybe I'm overestimating the diplomatic powers of Shane McGowan if I don't. Anyway, I'm very grateful for you all to come out. I know that, you know, this time of year there's a lot of stuff going on, there's Christmas markets, there's presents, there's rapping and all that. So it's great that it's really great to see you here. So the book, Biopolitics Borders Migration and the Power of Locomotion, it's a edited book and my co-editors who can't be here tonight, they're both in Europe, Charles Heller, Migration Researcher and Filmmaker based in Geneva and Lorenzo Pazzani, a architect and artist based in Bologna. And originally we planned to write it as a monograph along with Matt Coleman, who's a professor at Ohio State but did his MA with us in political economy at Carlton many years ago. We soon realized though that we weren't sort of up to the task of, or our capabilities didn't match our ambition, so it turned into an edited book and Matt dropped out but we were very grateful for his involvement and support at an early stage. And so, I mean, the book's got a great cast of collaborators and they're really responsible for a lot of whatever benefits it has. It took shape from multiple directions. With Charles and Lorenzo, they were doing really important work on boat crossings in the Mediterranean. It was a project that they called forensic oceanography which they started at Goldsmiths College in London where they were using open source data such as satellite photography coupled with interviews with migrants and with support movements and with officials in the Mediterranean area. And they were sort of looking to make maps and videos and reports that sort of bring transparency and accountability to situations where European navies and coast guards had failed to intervene to help migrants in distress at sea. Often those failures or those non-rescue resulted in tragedy. So in my case, the book began with a puzzle which was kind of related to the work that they were doing and it was a sort of fact that you had this, by the mid-2000s, the sort of images of boat crossings that you'd see everywhere, sort of media spectacle of people graded onto the small craft crossing the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe and the sort of mass loss of life that was happening as a result of that. And it struck me that one thing you could say about this was that it was a sort of return of the boat to the scene of migration, but in a morbid and perverse form. And by this, I mean that we're familiar with those sort of scenes, those images of the 19th and early 20th century, the sort of great transatlantic migrations. So if you go to Peer, 21 in Halifax or to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, you see these images of steamers pulling out of Hamburg or Liverpool with sort of waving or the scene of arrival in North America. So this became one of the sort of iconic images of kind of settler colonial migration in the 19th and early 20th century. And I think that in the post war period, the boat in that sense disappears from the scene of migration, as more and more of the sort of transland at least in the transatlantic world, more and more of that kind of movement starts to take to move on to planes, right? And a plane journey is relatively short. I mean, in the early days, you might have stopped in Gander to refuel and Gander has a really interesting history is a sort of place of asylum seeking for that reason. But your journey might have been relatively short, not especially romantic or eventful. And I think of when I came to Canada on a sort of permanent basis, I came from London to Toronto, I'm just wearing a pair of track pants. I had $10 in my wallet, right? This is sort of, it's white middle class privilege, but I could say, well, I came to this country with just $10 in my pocket and look at me now, sort of being like, yeah, obviously I had a bank account and all of that, but in fact now, just for the reason, I've only got $3 in my pocket right now, they're American dollars. So, I don't know what it says about me, I guess I'm not very cash or, yeah, not big into cash. But anyway, all that's to say that the plane contributed to this sort of abstracting away of the journey, you know, the sort of journey in the vehicle disappears from the scene of migration, at least again in the transatlantic world. And if you sort of read migration studies in the 1970s, 80s, there's very little there, probably about journeys. It's sort of like the actual movement isn't so much a thing. And so what we're seeing in the Mediterranean, for example, is kind of bringing the boat back into that scene. And so I thought that was a very interesting moment. So via politics, the book sort of says, where are the missing vehicles? You know, there's no human movement without cars, planes, boats, bicycles, you know, just recently people biking into Finland from Russia, you know, or donkeys or horses or a pair of boots that you might need to cross a mountain range. So there's no migration without these kinds of vehicles and without various kinds of prosthetics. But, you know, I felt that there wasn't enough of that in border and migration writing. There's a lot of attention, things like the camp and the sanctuary and the border itself are sort of made into, they're not just empirical sites but they become concepts as well and sort of materials to sort of develop theories for better or worse, you know, the camp, for better or worse about migration. But why not sort of do that with the vehicles? It seems to be sort of intuitive almost that the vehicle should have much more and the vehicle on the route should have much more kind of presence or irreducibility in the way we think about it. So that was a big part of the motivation for the book and for the people that we kind of recruited. I'll just say a couple of words about, you know, the ungainly and potentially confusing neologism, you know, that we've got biopolitics. Well, you know, it's confusing because people sometimes hear biopolitics and they think, oh no, not another Foucault book, you know, how boring is that? You know, Foucault provided some of the inspiration for our method but it's not a work of Foucault worship or even Foucault scholarship. So biopolitics instead, you know, with a B has at least three meanings. Viya refers to the means of travel. I came to Watua via train. Second, it's the route that you might take. I traveled via Toronto. And third, and this is something I don't think we did enough in the book but it would be nice to do it further. It refers to the road or the way, you know, from the Latin via. And here we wanted to sort of summon something that seems transcendental in different cultures. You know, it's the fact that the road, the way, the journey is this sort of hugely powerful and recurring motif as a metaphor or a symbol across many cultures. You know, think of the road and the journey of Christianity, think of Icarus and Daedalus and Tragedy, or think of what the author Joseph Campbell famously called the monomyth, you know, the hero's journey. And of course in Canada, or at least this part of Canada, via has a fourth meaning. And here it stands for the most underfunded railway service probably in North America. A train that waits for the goods to pass. You know, a train where the logs move faster than the people. In other words, a synonym for lateness. And so if anyone's coming to this event via via, maybe from via Montreal or Kingston, then you're probably not here yet. Yeah, so, I mean, that's a little bit about the term and the authors work it in different ways. In my chapter, I wrote about, along with my collaborator Clara Le Cadet in Paris, I wrote about air deportation, you know, and here the argument I think made even more strongly that, you know, even though there's now a large literature about deportation, it writes about social movements, it writes about detention centers, it looks at struggles, it looks at legal cases. But, you know, the actual physical way in which people are often forcibly moved barely features in it at all. You know, and again, if you're looking at, say, how European countries deport people globally, you know, they rely overwhelmingly on airlines, civil aviation. And so why wouldn't, you know, planes and airline companies and airports be given a much more central place in our thinking about these things? And so, yeah, that was, we were sort of interested in how the vehicle, the plane especially features both as a sort of material site where struggles go on and planes make a difference. You know, just consider the fact that the pilot is a kind of sovereign, especially once the plane is in flight. Even when the plane is sitting on the runway, once the doors are closed, the pilot has a kind of sovereignty. You know, you can trace that sovereignty back to the seas where, you know, you have even a sort of avowed communist like Friedrich Engels says, you know, there will be communism and sort of collective rule everywhere, except on the high seas where it's really you need somebody who's in charge. You know, you can't have, when you're the ship in trouble, you can't sort of get a committee together and sort of vote about what are you gonna do? No, you need this sort of sovereign figure who says this will be done, you know. And of course that then via the sea boat that turns into the kind of sovereignty of the pilot. So pilots, you know, they have the power to say if somebody is struggling on a plane, this is not safe, you know, in the name of aviation safety, you can't fly this person. They don't do that all that much, but they do it sometimes. So it shows you that the plane is a little bottleneck. It's a sort of potential choke point in the process. So the plane is sort of both a material zone in the process, but it's also a very symbolic process because, you know, one of the things that a lot of our governments do precisely because these flights get disrupted, they sort of create charter flights, you know, and on a charter plane, nobody can hear you scream. And that's a quote from an interview with a sort of senior board as official. No one's there to hear you scream when you're on the charter plane. And the charter plane will leave, you know, in the middle of the night from a remote part of the airport, maybe leave from a military airport. And that matters because, you know, it's very secretive and shady, but, you know, what does it sound like? What does that kind of image of people disappearing in the middle of the night on a plane bring to mind? It brings to mind things like, you know, other situations in which people have disappeared on planes, whether it was in the dirty wars in Chile and Argentina or more recently, sort of extraordinary renditions. Now, I mean, I'm not saying that the air deportation on charter is the same as those things, but there's echoes and there echoes that, you know, activists and migrants themselves will draw upon to sort of denounce this practice, sort of say, well, this is a sort of sinister kind of, so in other words, the plane is there also as a sort of symbolic field, as a way to sort of mobilize concern. And yeah, so that's about everything I wanted to say. So other than answering any questions and comments that you'll have, but thank you again for coming along. Thank you. APPLAUSE So we'd like to ask a reaction from, we didn't ask, discuss who's going next, but who would like to speak further? Yeah. Sure, I'm happy to jump in. So a lot of my reaction to this book is filtered through experience of researching migration and border security in West Africa in particular and, in fact, coming into that interest from a sort of longstanding interest in, you know, why some people can move and why some people can't. And in fact, I don't mean to make this too autobiographical, but one of the first, as a young person, one of the first things that made me realize, in fact, we had a very globally stratified system of mobility was reading about two young boys from Guinea who had tried to climb into the landing gear of a flight to Brussels from Conakry in Guinea and who in fact had fallen out on arrival, but they had written a note, and they had written a note to the leaders of Europe about the aspirations of African youth. That, for me, was very formative in terms of realizing the extents to which people would go to travel to the global north. Fast forward a number of years. I was interested in surveillance and security studies, and when I was trying to figure out where I would do my PhD, actually, I had a meeting with William, and one of the first things he mentioned was ships and the narratives of arrival around ships, which you see very clearly in the book, and that all pieced together in my brain as the years went by, and seeing this book is the sort of culmination of that thought process has been very interesting because even though I didn't work with you for my PhD, no offense or no nothing personal, but in the end, I ended up chasing the missing vehicles, in fact, that are so core to that curiosity that animates the question of via politics. So in my own work, I became very interested in how vehicles kind of symbolized how the European Union and European member states in general tried to move their borders into new spaces, and especially in Africa, to try and preempt human mobility at source, and ended up kind of doing some of this work without knowing until I could find a sort of word for it, the sort of chasing the missing vehicles that represented certain elements that were of interest to me, and one of those was how do external actors frame the ways that they work with local actors, especially in the police sector, and one of the ways is this kind of relationship of development, right, so you often find that investments are made in countries like Senegal, and Guinea, in Mali, and elsewhere, which are intended to reinforce the capacity of these countries to prevent people from trying to go to Europe, and one of the key elements of that is donations, donations of equipment, donations and training in terms of reinforcing security sector capacity, training the police and so on, and consistently in those conversations vehicles come up, and they come up and are very reflective of how all of those people envision their place in that system, right, so European police and diplomats who work in West Africa, who are working on questions of migration, are often sort of taken aback by the requests that are made by local police institutions for more vehicles, right, they say they keep asking us for cars, they keep asking us for trucks, because they want to show off in these vehicles, right, that betrays a certain sensibility and way that African states and officials from African states are perceived by their European partners when we think about migration management. So that already was one thing that resonated with me a lot in terms of thinking about the role of vehicles in migration management. So I think the concept via politics is useful for that very sort of blunt material question, right, what are the vehicles, what do they symbolize, what do they tell us about the ways that North and South relate and Africa's place in the world, and how, in fact, migration is managed today. But beyond that, I think there's something also that goes beyond the vehicle, and I think that's one of the big contributions of this concept and of the book that's built around it, which is that this is not just looking at some kind of technical thing, it's not just looking at vehicles as some kind of technical tool that we are just going to focus on for its own sake, right, it's trying to see those as entry points into broader political questions. And one of those is the question of routes, right, and so if you look at your typical article in The Economist about African migration, you're usually confronted with a map that has about a thousand arrows on it going north towards Europe. Here's how the routes are shifting, here's how people are going through Libya, here's where people are going now versus five years ago. So again, this question of routes and how people navigate those, whether it's sea routes, whether it's through the Sahara Desert, is foundational, in fact, to the imagination that the average sort of person in the European public has about how African people move and how people come to Europe. So for me, in terms of my own work, I've come across so many of these concepts and often didn't have a name for them. So I think the key kind of contribution here is giving a name to some of those disparate questions in terms of vehicles, routes, and also kind of the geography, in fact, of how people move. I don't want to make this just research anecdotes, but one of the things that I noticed in working in Niger, which shares a border with Libya, and which until recently was one of the main kind of transit countries from West Africa to Europe, is that the Toyota Hilux pickup truck plays a sort of foundational role in irregular migration, but also in the general economy of transport across the Sahara Desert in that country. And that was, for me, it surprised me the extent to which it was not just seen across these kind of materials, again, in the sort of Economist article about irregular migration. You'll have pictures of pickup trucks filled with migrants crossing the desert. Even in the culture in terms of speaking to smugglers, speaking to their families, this kind of role of the vehicle as a device that enables some kind of autonomy, that enables some kind of participation in the economy, I think it highlighted for me how important the vehicle is as an entry point into not just understanding policing and understanding irregular migration, but also the whole social system around it and what that means. One of the things that struck me in this book was a set of maps in the chapter by Casas Cortes and Coparubias, chapter 6, I believe, which shows, in fact, how the European Union sees the states around it. So this kind of the Schengen zone, the main European states of free movement, you have the European neighborhood countries, such as countries in Eastern Europe, but also along the Mediterranean, Algeria and Turkey, and then you have the transit zone and that's where you have all the countries that I've worked in, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, for example, and then you have the source countries, which are even further afield. So you have the sort of layers of an onion in terms of not just vehicles and how people move about, but also the geography itself of migration. I found that to be very, very instructive. So perhaps just to kind of wrap up, again, it's another anecdote, but it's an instructive one and looking through so many of these different chapters, including the very good chapter on the question of passenger comfort and how this question of human cargo is kind of delimited away from other cargo. I think the point of view of the rail is quite interesting. The physical cargo takes priority over the human cargo in many ways. I was recently flying from Paris to Noixchart in Mauritania and that flight continued on to Conakry in Guinea and on that flight there were French police who came to every single passenger and said, we are doing a deportation today on this plane. You do not say anything, do not speak, do not intervene, do not film, and Air France made it very clear that if you do any of those things, in fact, you're banned from the airline. So you can speak up and have solidarity, but then you lose your sort of comfort and privilege that you would have and all your frequent flyer points that goes with it, right? So it was very, very stark in terms of the question of comfort and the question of the porter being enforced. One thing that sticks with me from that particular experience was the policeman told me sometimes there's a lot of shouting, right? It wasn't just sometimes these people do, it was just like, sometimes there's some screaming, just ignore it. And I think that there's something about examining vehicles that shows us North-South relationships between states, it shows us how security functions, it helps us to understand how some people move and how some people don't. And it also, I think, if this sort of Air France story of mine is a reminder, it also shows us in fact the highly classed and class-driven distinctions on which so much of this question of borders and global segregation actually functions. Thank you very much for the opportunity to read and engage with the book. All right. So thank you so much for having me with you tonight. I must say that this is a great pleasure and honor to be here. I began reading William's work in my graduate studies as I was beginning to become interested in thinking through questions of forced migration, access to mobility and safety and so on. And it really did make a huge impact for me. So it's really humbling and a little surreal to be here tonight commenting on this fantastic collection. So thanks for inviting me. Via Politics is an exceptional and insightful collection that invites us, and by that I mean people in the field of migration studies, to consider mobility from the more material, intimate and at once foundational vantage point of the means, vehicles and vessels that make movement possible. I think this reorientation of our perspective in relation to migration allows us to have a much more phenomenological understanding of the actual and material bodies that migrate and the processes that regulate the bodies on the move. Most importantly I think this approach allows us to ask different and at times more generative questions. I can go on and on about the contribution of this collection to the field of migration studies to which I myself belong but I would much prefer to showcase the potency and insightfulness of Via Politics by applying it to an example of mass forced migration that is happening in front of our eyes at this moment in Gaza. And you have to excuse me I'm a scholar of forced migration and it is my occupational habit to look for events of mass migration and the patterns of access to mobility. And there's much that can be said obviously about the devastating effects of the siege and bombardment on the Gaza Strip but in my brief notes today I will focus on aspects of this tragedy that I believe can be very insightfully analyzed from the lens of Via Politics with the hopes of demonstrating the exceptional range of questions that this approach would allow us. Via Politics as William noted gets its name from the three meanings of the word Via in the first meaning Via refers to the vehicles that make migration possible. In the case of Gaza thinking about vehicles of migration encourages us to consider how do large numbers of people who have been ordered immediate evacuation may in fact move quickly under literal threat of bombs. What are the vehicles that they use to move? And especially how may they use these vehicles given the chronic and more recent acute shortage of fuel in Gaza? It is in this context that we have seen footage of overcrowded vehicles filled to the brim with the elderly and those with mobility limitations as well as the use of hand-pulled carts to move belongings and above all hundreds and hundreds of people on foot carrying luggage and mattresses hanging from their arms. The focus on vehicles of migration allows us to consider the human body as sometimes the only remaining vehicle and the tool that this must take on the feet on the back and then the overworked and emaciated vehicles. The second meaning of VIA references the routes and structure infrastructure of travel. This meaning asks us to consider which points people may choose to or be forced to move through in their journeys from one point to another. In the instance of the mass displacement in Gaza we all have heard a lot about the Rafa border crossing with Egypt as the supposedly only exit point out of Gaza. But it might be helpful for us to be reminded that in fact the largest land border Gaza's largest land border is not with Egypt but with Israel itself and yet the possibility of civilians escaping through the neighboring Israel is completely muted. In the twisted geopolitical reality that surrounds Gaza Egypt's remains the only land neighbor the only exit route producing an exceptionally packed bottleneck at this very one single border crossing. And of course it's the evacuation order itself that creates this bottleneck by ordering evacuees to the south of the strip and not for example towards the north towards Lebanon. And thus it is at this one point border point which is heavily guarded that Gazans hurl and wait and wait again to be allowed exit. Via politics helps us to be reminded of the fact that the possibility of exiting Gaza only through Rafa is purely politically driven. The third meaning of Via refers to the due physical environment that migrants travels and states aim to control. Thinking about the geographical landscape of Gaza's displacement from a view political perspective one may also wonder about the large coast to the west and the open air above and yet the fact that land travel remains the only viable option. We might take it for granted that Gazans must exit through a land border with Egypt but this reality is only produced by the impossibility of air evacuation due to bombings and sea travel due to the militarization of the Mediterranean Sea. In other words the due physical environment that displays Gazans must navigate is deeply shaped by political forces. I said all this to kind of argue that Via politics allows us to consider the displacement of Gazans with fresh eyes and ask different questions about the possibilities and means of movement and I will conclude my half-baked remarks here and look forward to your comments on the book. Thank you. I didn't find them half-baked at all. William, I saw you taking a lot of notes there and I thought you might want to respond to some of the things that the others have said. Well, I'll be very brief because I'm really keen to hear what people might have to say but I'm very grateful for these comments and I think in what you both said what I like is that that Via politics has been sort of like a sensitizing device so that maybe there were things there that you knew about them already you could see them, you read about them you experienced them first hand and the book and the term sort of it gives you sort of added jolt or something I mean I think of it a bit like a license maybe it's not the right word but I mean there's lots of times when I've worked on things and I think nobody's written about this probably because there's nothing much to say or like I better not say I better not write about it because I look stupid because there must be a reason why nobody's written about this yet and so when you finally see somebody that does you sort of think oh yeah maybe that's because maybe there is something to be said so if it works like that I'm really happy to pick up on what I'm feeling by saying about toyotas you know it certainly made me think isn't it interesting you know when I started in graduate school all the talk was of Fordism and post-Fordism right these were cars it's like a car brand an entire theory of capitalism and the world and everything built out of this car brand and you know I think people did start to play around a little bit with other brands of cars Bentleyism I don't know but you know there's a sort of toyotatism that you're talking about there and I think yeah there's a sort of symbolism of a pickup truck I mean another thing I would say is that one reason that we did this was we kind of wanted to get away from just we wanted it we were a little bit concerned by a sort of border fetishism like obsessively trying to develop some grand theory of the border that you can then process everything about migration through that because after all it doesn't capture all the situations where people aren't necessarily crossing the borders because they're internally displaced or they're sort of moving around China for example some of the biggest movements in human history are inside China so it was to sort of get away a little bit from a sort of border fetishism and also yeah to bring some dynamism in because after all again the border even though we might say oh the border stretched and it's moved and all of those things which is true you're still talking about a line or a structure or a division but there's something very dynamic about vehicles and travel and it's true that some of this work is now done under it's done under the heading of mobility and we had a kind of discussion about mobility when we were writing the book and the reviewers some of whom were mobility scholars were saying yes what about mobility you know you need to pay us a due and yes you're quite right so we put more of that in but one of the reasons we didn't want to do it under the heading of mobility and this is something we did learn from Foucault is that you know mobility is like this this buzz word it's like a it's a good thing for the most part in our societies you know it's like Apple Pie you know everyone sort of says good things about mobility governments talk about mobility they want to promote it and so you get into I think a bit of a there's a kind of anachronism if you start talking about the things happening in the 18th century in the language of mobility you know the term that the 18th century wouldn't have used itself so it seemed better to us to have a sort of synthetic term that couldn't be accused of anachronism and I like the reference to the vessel as well because it sort of takes us back to you know vessels aren't necessarily vehicles vessels might be silos that you store grain or water in which is a very interesting point makes me think of I can never remember his name he wrote Technics and Civilization Mumford Lewis Mumford he has some wonderful things to say about vessels and cities and civilization yeah thank you again all right well now we move to the part of the evening of a question we have a microphone up there I also encourage the panelists sort of interplay and engage further more things more things pop in your head but I do encourage the audience to come to the microphone question comment reflection airline story anything there Mumford please okay thank you very much this was a really interesting introduction to the book I am not yet a reader of the book but I just had a couple of questions about Williams introduction about sort of possible genealogies of via politics and what I was struck by and I mean this may just have been a selection of what you decided to introduce in your introduction and not what's reflected in the book so I'm wondering if there are other genealogies of the boat in particular and of the sea that are reflected in the book so I mean I was just struck by the fact that you sort of evoked a kind of white Atlantic as the genealogy of how we think about how we may think about via politics or that for the disappearance of via politics in scholarship but of course there's also the black Atlantic and the slave ship as a kind of genealogy and then more recently I mean we could also think of the ships that transported Jews were fleeing from the Nazis during World War II and seems to me that I mean these kinds of vessels would be quite connected to the what I take to be sort of critical approaches to via politics in various chapters of the book and also in terms of the regional context that Philip talked about and so that's my first question to what extent well what one could broadly call the black Atlantic is sort of reflected as a genealogy of and perhaps the original via politics of modernity in fact I would venture to say I mean I haven't thought about this but and secondly sort of in also in relation to your comment about angles and that he thought that the sea was a space where you needed the sovereign I was sort of thinking more of Carl Schmidt who sort of said that the sea is a space without sovereignty that's the space of the pirate and the well in the examples which I gave earlier the slave trader or today the migration broker or something like that so I was just wondering about sort of the role of I mean how sovereignty and it's others are being discussed in relation to via politics in the book Yeah okay thank you the answer to the first question would be that say questions of slavery and the black Atlantic feed in for example to the chapter by Rene Mewani about the the journey of the Komagata Maru that comes from India to British Columbia and she uses explicitly the term or the concept of the middle passage to partly capture like both ways in which travelers on that ship might have talked about their own experience but also to sort of draw from the literature that you're talking about precisely the sort of idea that a certain kind of solidarity can arise in the journey under the most desperate circumstances now the Komagata Maru was not a slave ship but it was a long journey under very difficult circumstances where she says you know there was sort of new kinds of affiliations that took shape amongst the passengers who were of quite diverse backgrounds of Sikhs and Muslims and Hindus and so for her yes the black Atlantic then is important for helping us think about how the ship isn't just a vehicle or a vessel but you know an experience right it's a sort of it's not just a sort of movement from A to B it's a time space in which transformation happens in good and often in very bad ways the second point about Schmidt I think this came up when I the very first time I started to talk about this and I think I'd say it's that you know Schmidt is talking about a different time certainly if you're looking if you're talking about and Philippe would know much more about this than me but if you're looking at say the Mediterranean now it's not a case of space that's sort of now beyond sovereignty it's so striated you know and this is what Charles and Lorenzo work on especially you know I've got all these different zones like search and rescue zone and these are all kind of distributed amongst the states you know so and they don't necessarily overlap this sort of and what happens on the fate of a ship very depends on which of these zones it's in and the states are playing games you to get out of our zone we want to stop you before you get into our zone so I would say that the sea is extremely sort of striated and there's a very significant sort of sovereign politics going on there but there would be other places where perhaps we could talk about this this space that's sort of at a threshold you know and maybe if we're talking about the moon and you know interplanetary travel then we're getting into sort of you know there's a bit of a scramble going on around the moon about you know who gets to put various kinds of devices on what parts of the moon there's a sort of countries that are like scrambling for the moon in some ways and what do you do about space junk I've got a first year student writing a brilliant paper about space junk you know how can you regulate this stuff and you know the more that space X sends up the more there's going to be this stuff because you've seen their approach to space travel it's like disposable it's super disposable right just actually a quick point on the question of the sea and I think this point about the sea being highly surveilled and highly watched and known in many ways as a space is very clear in the Mediterranean there have been huge investments by the EU and like satellite surveillance and sensors and detection and all these types of things so in fact you know when boats do sink or you know capsize boats full of migrants in the Mediterranean that's very often the product of a kind of deliberate looking away rather than a kind of misunderstanding or misapprehension of what's actually happening on the sea I use that as an entry point into a line that stuck with me from one interview with an official I did in Brussels mentioned to me in fact that we have to sort of see the desert referring to the Sahara as very similar to the sea in fact we shouldn't see these as very very distinct spaces because they have very similar you know you have similar routes that you have to take there are routes that are historically very powerful and that smugglers and others have used over time and in fact this idea that the desert and the sea are similar they require different vehicles obviously but it's actually one that I've encountered now in a bunch of different conversations the international organization for migration as well consistently points out you know the Mediterranean is deadly but we also need to see the Sahara desert as being equally deadly it's like another Mediterranean but we don't hear as much about it because it's further away and so this idea of equivalence across different routes but also the grounding of those routes is very very powerful one last reflection in terms of the kind of colonial anchoring of a lot of these things like when we look at the Sahara again coming back to the zone that I know best but a lot of the routes that smugglers take are very very long established that are long deeply entrenched cross or trans-Saharan trade routes for example but I found it very interesting to in the case of the Komagata Maru for example that was sort of the initial rejection was because of the indirect journey right it's like this idea that the British colonial authority said if you stop on the way well you should have got out there instead and that reminds me a lot of the safe third country agreement it seems to be a very similar idea that we have with the United States which is well the US is safe if you stop there first you can't come to Canada right and so it's a we have different ways of describing these things we have different legal frameworks we talk about human rights a bit more but some of these ways of thinking about routes and where people came via somewhere else in fact we are very similar to the US the centuries yeah I think the question of the black Atlantic I think you're right on point and I think the book references that a little bit but also when you think about the height of engineering that went into creation of the slave ships I think where politics really makes you think about the vehicle as part of the production of the slave as part of the commodification of human body the sort of like the technology that went into creating like optimizing the number of people and their containment and detainment and sort of their physical restraint I think we can sort of like not separate that from the journey itself and I think it's I mean it's like I think where I think migration studies can meet the you know scholarship on transatlantic slave trade but that's precisely a very good point of like meeting the two scholarships to be like how did this you know the vehicle was a huge product part of the production of the enslaved and a means of movement a means of like forcibly removing people so I think it's speaks to that perfectly more questions at all for the audience if your question is where can I buy this book you know the answer is at the back it's a great bargain great bargain any other questions or thoughts Laura please thanks thanks very much to all of you for your comments so William you said something about well we can't think about mobility without thinking about the planes and the boats and the cars and so forth that transport people and then you threw in boots at the end and as an Americanist you know most of the people coming north or even within the south are traveling by foot and Sara you talked about the migrants in Gaza who are mostly going to be traveling by foot so I'm just wondering do you see boots as the same as cars of course by via you're also talking about routes and so forth so I totally get that this would be a useful framework for looking at that but I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on that and I just thought you I was also thinking about environmental issues if you also could link this to thinking about the car as the preeminent form of transportation which is and the link in political economy to the petroleum fuel transportation form as the favorite form of mobility. Thanks very much sorry yeah there's a great question about walking and one of the chapters in the book is about migrants who walk across the Alps in it that's not such a dissimilar scenario and I think one of the things and I think this was something that was raising with the Gaza example that if somebody walks across a desert or walks a long distance like that it's not because they can't afford a bus I mean if people take boats across the Mediterranean it's not because they can't afford a flight because the flights have never been cheaper I mean it's changed a little bit now but since the budget airlines come along flying has never been cheaper so it's not about money it's about how other modes and routes and ways have become blocked off to certain people it's about the stratification and I think that one of the we can't understand what say happens in the Mediterranean without kind of taking into effect aviation because I think it's precisely because of the something about the ability of authorities to sort of control airports especially they become the most difficult places by no means impossible because all sorts of it becomes what Julie Chew in the book calls paper routes you have to engage in all sorts of activities to acquire the papers and maybe to change your face so that you can pass through the channel of aviation and that happens but there's something about the extent to which aviation systems can be sort of so well surveyed and controlled that forces people into these other modes so you know you control after all our kind of narratives of modernity and progress sort of say well you know the ship is this sort of old ancient thing then along comes a train and then you know by the 1950s you think of aviation as the sort of future so when the boat comes back it turns to the scene of migration it's this sort of paradox isn't it because we thought this was a thing from the past and it comes back precisely partly because of the control over aviation and that control wasn't just about migration 1970s hijacking all sorts of fears about you know that have come from somewhere else like we've got to control planes we've got to control airports we can't have them turned into weapons and so on so that was a kind of conjunction so yeah that's why and that's one reason why walking it's relational right the walking and the swimming and so on is precisely because of what's happened with those other routes and vehicles the environmental thing yeah I think that's it's not something we really talked about in the book at all really but yeah you can sort of look at the electric car as a sort of you know it's our it's one of the ways we now dream about a future that sort of somehow squares the circle you know or again I've got another student in first year class writing an excellent paper on Porsche and e-fuel you know like Porsche is saying we can't sell enough electric cars if we can just fix e-fuel you can sort of have it all kind of thing you know we can't quite give up the car no matter how bad things might get yeah maybe on the question of fuel I mean it brings up the question of emissions and air and more generally I think there was a particular point in one of the chapters on the one on human cargo if I remember correctly which was about ventilation right sort of bad air what do you do about that and the thing that came to mind for me was the pandemic and the way that that also shifted you know not just at borders and questions of how people move internationally but also how we move around the city right so the use of personal vehicles went up quite a lot in part because it was a ventilation question right like if you can avoid being in a bus with 52 people you can be in your own little sort of ventilated bubble and you can have your music and all the rest so this kind of question of mobility became tied to also questions of kind of clean air safe air or or not and it seems that you know that's one observation but I think it's also when we look at what's going on in terms of how borders are controlled how mobility gets channeled today a lot of it is using that sort of justification of avoiding contact right so lots of technologies like facial recognition are being rebranded as kind of contactless identification especially in a post pandemic context airlines airport authorities are using social distancing as a justification to in to launch more things like facial recognition in place of a paper boarding card right at the airport so it's it does seem to me that this question of air and clean air and maintaining cleanliness and health is also part of the justification of how we move and how we access in fact these modes of mobility that question of the walking I think we sort of we have to think about the human body as a as a form of vehicle and I think people in the case of people on the move who are trying to find safety I think walk sometimes so that they're not affected and I think in the case of Casa they walk because what else what else can one possibly do even if you have a car and you don't have fuel like it's the last remaining way to move and I think the question of the emissions and environment is really fascinating because I don't think people who are on the move to find safety are not thinking about the most environmental way of movement they're just like looking for safety and I think it's I think I actually quite like the way that geopolitics makes us think about how do people actually what how do they like how do they literally get from this one to the other and what are the options and you know the options are sort of very direly controlled and limited and regulated by these much wider forces that are around them and some of it is about border control and some of it is about you know seem to be unrelated to border control in that sense one thing that I would also say about say walking or when you have to take a small boat is it it creates a scene where the where you become debased or degraded by the fact that you are walking you know so it becomes of course it's all contextual because if it's a photograph of somebody hiking in the mountains that's great you know it's all sort of a health and environment but the sort of when you're sort of walking out of place you become sort of bothered by the very fact of that you're walking you know where health is taking transport or the fact that you're in a boat you know hence we have from the 70s you know the boat people you gotta ask yourself why does and what conditions does a people or a community or a group come to be named by the vehicle right we don't speak of the plain people you know all the people have come to kind of the plain people started to arrive here in the 50s you know we have the boat people we'll be talking about the caravans of people coming from you know like there's a and there's a real class thing obviously there alright thank you very much we are coming I think to a close of our time so I am going to start to draw things to a close I want to thank very much first William for allowing allowing us to feature your book of you and your co-editors so it was great to hear about the book so thanks very much Philippe in a set I'm so glad that you joined us to speak about the book to lend your own expertise to apply it to current issues as you did decide there so we really have so glad to have our guest from the University of Ottawa and from the Department of Social and Anthropology William's other department so we decided to leave thank you so much for coming up for sitting on our little stools here for engaging with this and for the audience for your questions and your engagement I do have a couple of closing remarks and thanks I first want to say that of course this is a series of author meets readers keeps going we do not have one in December don't come here in December I do come here, Irene's probably happy to have you here every single night but we but author meets readers will take a break for December February on Thursday January 25th I believe Duncan McHugh from the School of Journalism and Communication will be speaking on his book in indigenizing journalism so that's in late January and just so you're thinking about the lineup in February our featured author will be Susan Brady at the School of Social Work on her new book on March will be another of my political science colleagues Melissa Hausman on her new book and April we actually have a vacancy at the moment for April and author meets readers we're looking for books if no one fills it, I'll fill one of my own books but we'd like to have anyone here who's an FBA who has a book that hasn't been featured yet we do have a vacancy so please let us know but for the audience thank you very much for coming thank you very much for hearing about this book we hope to see you at further events I do want to of course thank certain people for this, I first want to thank our friends Irene's pop and Mike for hosting us many times not sure how many, maybe up to 10 years we've been doing this, not sure but Irene's pop has been a great partner for this also octopus books, if I mentioned before the book is for sale at the back I don't know if I mentioned that as octopus books has been a great partner with us as well and also I do want to thank the people in the faculty of public affairs who make this happen so lawyer McGrath, our events coordinator who's at the back who arranges all this also Jeff Flissant who is providing the camera and the technology thank you very much for that and if Karen Kelly and her comms team are here, they put a lot of work into the posters if you saw the video of William speaking about this book we put on quite a comms push for this event so thanks to them for that but thanks ultimately for the author for the readers and for all of you that came out for this event, so thanks very much and please have a safe evening, bye bye