Beyond citizenship: the material politics of alternative infrastructures

This paper argues for a line of inquiry in the intersection between migration studies and STS work around the notion of material politics in alternative spaces. Drawing on multisited ethnographic inputs, I describe arrangements of cooperation coexisting with post-conflict reparation in Colombia and governmental humanitarianism in Greece. I follow material practices transforming objects into arrangements of remembrance and collective support and address the orders enacted by these practices as alternative infrastructures challenging infrastructures of migration control. The notion of alternative infrastructures offers the possibility to epistemically explore an overlooked angle by citizenship studies and STS; it engages with the objects and relations embedded in the materiality of everyday life and its politics beyond the boundaries of instituted forms of citizenship.