Border Crossing Assemblages: Differentiated Travelers and the Viapolitics of FlixBus

Peter Teunissen

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2020, vol. 35, issue 3, 385-401

Abstract: The critical border scholar William Walters argues that although vehicles of mobility (e.g. coaches, boats, and airplanes) are important features of mobility and migration, there is relatively little attention paid to the relation between materiality and migration. This research follows Walters’ notion of viapolitics to approach the bordering of mobility from the middle, from the perspective of the vehicle and not just the state, to gain a more theoretical and comprehensive understanding of human mobility and its entanglement with power-relations. Building upon assemblage theory, mobility studies, and contemporary border studies this research aims to lay bare the viapolitics of FlixBus. Drawing upon a mobile ethnography, that combines my own FlixBus travels with the analyses of policy documents and international agreements, I illustrate how FlixBus represents and reproduces scattered borderscapes. The analysis results in a concluding call for differentiated understanding of body/vehicle relations in order to understand better the bordering of mobility within the European Union.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2018.1452165

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