Toward Refugee Thick Mobility: More-than-Human Emergence at Oceanic Borderlands

In this talk, I will consider literary imaginations of refugee ecology across Australia’s oceanic borderlands in the context of extinction. Public policy and media tends to totalize asylum seekers into abstract figures of security threat, faceless mass, or humanitarian rescue. While dominant bio-and-necropolitical frameworks offer important insights into studying hierarchies of life and human to counter sovereign erasure, such approaches also reinforce anthropocentric structures of life, foreclosing ecological modes of refugee political mobility.

In response, I suggest a framework of refugee thick mobility can account for entangled, contingent, and more-than-human emergence. Recent refugee literature and cinema invite ways of reading displaced humans and nonhumans together, illuminating the overlap of oceanic ecologies, species migration, extractive capitalism, and biopolitical geographies. Through more-than-human crossings, a bioregional and eco-social account reimagines oceanic borderlands as emergent sites of body-place encounters against the territorial claims and telos of sovereign Australia.