Healing Borderscapes: Archiving through Networking in Refugee 'hotspot' Islands

As displacement defines the future, exposing the unorthodox colonial practices that continue to disenfranchise refugees, host communities and fragile territories becomes pertinent. Bordermaking is a process in constant flux, marked by violence, enclosures, shifts in notions and practices of care and hospitality, of legal concepts and categories such as internationally defined rights, as well as by resistance and social innovation. In the Aegean, there is a wealth of knowledge for doing things differently – more humanely, equitably, and sustainably- in relation to the management of migration. This knowledge is continuously being erased through the increased bureaucratisation and criminalisation of solidarity networks and other independent care initiatives.

Working with various NGOs, civil society groups and humanitarians, this paper asks how to do research in a context marked by violence to better understand and archive the knowledge produced in borderscapes? And how to move research beyond ‘doing no harm’, and devising processes for healing and empowering of different actors dealing with the effects of bordering on a daily basis. The paper shares the novel methodology of archiving through networking, allowing the validation of previously ‘silenced’ experiences and healing through collective reflections of shared traumas. Beyond drawing learnings for policy design and care provision, such methodologies can also better support the reconstruction of the long-term social memory of contested and multifaceted governance periods marked by violent separation, as well as by cross-cultural contact, collective resistances and social ingenuity.