Refugees, asylum-seekers, internationally displaced persons (IDPs), migrants, ethnic minorities, citizens and tourists are some of the categories that structure relationships between humans. They create opportunities for some, while restricting them for others. It is no news that various visible barriers have been created that sustain these different categories – Finland’s border fence on the eastern border, the ever-expanding wall between the US and Mexico, and the Separation wall cutting through Palestinian communities on the West Bank, to name a few. Those inside the fence are considered by the respective security apparatuses as deserving of safety and security, while those outside – and those who should be expelled from the inside – are seen as villains.
But maintaining the barriers between the different categories of humans requires more than concrete walls and barbed-wire fences. Some of the barriers that sustain these categories in everyday life are invisible and kept alive by ordinary common sense. It is precisely such invisible barriers that we explored in a panel and workshop Visualizing invisible barriers: Cartographies of everyday coexistence at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of Ethnic Relations and International Migration (ETMU) held at the University of Helsinki in November 2025. This year’s conference theme Breaking (digital) barriers: Designing and conceptualizing technologies of inclusive societies alluded to thinking about inclusion and technology in relation to migration and ethnic minorities.
Our quest to place the invisible at the center of our panel is informed by critical migration studies that seek to examine how unequal power, colonialism, and global capitalism structure mobility, borders and differentiated opportunities. Approaches developed in the recent decade point to the complicity of migration research in helping to produce its own subject – the “migrant”. They have consequently called for de-migranticizing migration research (Dahinden 2016; De Genova 2013) and questioned concepts such as ‘integration’ (Schinkel 2018).
These critical approaches expose how migration studies are, often unintentionally, generative of problematic categorizations of ‘us-versus-them’. For instance, Willem Schinkel (2017) argues that the political work of the concept of ‘integration’ is that it imagines ‘society’ as a space into which those ‘who need to integrate’ (immigrants and migrants) do not belong. Others have questioned the way in which migration research has equated nation with society (De Genova 2013; Glick Schiller 2010). It is not surprising that programs that aim at “integrating” are sometimes viewed as achieving the opposite: contributing to exclusion and ‘othering’ of those whom they target (Korteweg 2017; Özyürek 2023).
The way the different categories of humans are applied is generative of invisible barriers. They represent epistemic violence to many people – their knowledge and experiences are invalidated. In the extreme, the enforcement of these categories is premised on the potentiality of state inflicted (or tolerated) physical violence in the form of concrete acts of bordering. Migration researchers have the urgent task to deconstruct taken-for-granted ‘commonsense’ understandings that shape the study of human mobility.
Mapping the invisible
A few examples from our panel Visualizing invisible barriers help to illustrate the benefits of visual methods in deconstructing problematic commonsense approaches. The work of visual illustrator, Yorgos Konstantinou, manages to do what many research papers seldom do. In a booklet of 100 pages, it visualizes the hidden reality of people in a refugee camp in northern Greece and the collective space ‘Habibi works’ run by volunteers and activists near the camp. In the contemporary political moment when right-wing parties tend to set the parameters for the discussion, this approach can be easily defended against traditional scholarship. In his presentation, Yorgos asked, “What if people don’t read anymore? Or what if they withdraw to their own bubbles and only consume news that do not challenge what they already know?” In this context, a hybrid form of visual storytelling – something between ethnographic fieldwork and a graphic novel – could complement traditional scholarship.
Images by Yorgos Konstantinou
Two other presentations brought the question of maps into focus. Chamanie Nanayakkara’s research on the lived urban experiences of food delivery-drivers in Helsinki illuminates the often-invisible barriers shaping the experiences of racialized migrant workers. It also reveals a new map of the city highlighting rhythms, gestures, infrastructures, and affects. Liina Mustonen’s work poses the question of what kind of mapping exercise could be useful to understand the micro practices of resistance in Berlin among those who show solidarity for Palestine but are pushed to the margins by the German state. And how to account for the multiple ethical perspectives and questions such a project involves? Who even benefits from such research in today’s context?
In their critique of the Finnish public health system David Hoffman and Sonya Sahradyan in turn asked how to visualize the relationship between societal expectations and contemporary realities that further marginalize the already marginalized.
Mapping and other visual methods can bring light to the invisible and guide researchers to ask questions that have greater relevance for the lives of the people they work with. Such methods can also tell something about the scale of a phenomenon and illustrate how barriers are tied to time and space.
Sketching barriers together
Visual language also offers a tool to work around the politically loaded vocabulary and categories used for signifying human mobility. In an interactive workshop, taking his visual activism as an example, our workshop facilitator Yorgos Konstantinou highlighted the benefits and drawbacks of working with images. Pondering the differences between visual and written communication based on several decades of experience in visual storytelling, Yorgos suggested that our human brain does not have tools to defend itself against images but processes them head on. Yorgos’ method is based on the idea that the way we process images is more innocent than processing text and speech. While this means that images can be used for manipulating, they are also effective tools for communication and conveying complex meanings.
Drawing is an embodied way of making sense of the world. It is often considered an individual activity, but as we learnt during the workshop, it doesn’t have to be that way. With pencils in our hands, the fifteen participants of the workshop followed Yorgos in drawing a line where the start and end point met. Then the papers – with the closed forms on them – were passed on to the next person who added eyes, and then to the next one who added ears, and so on, until everyone had contributed to each other’s drawing. After the circle had come to an end, the figures on the paper had taken different forms resembling cartoon characters. The laughter these creatures prompted shifted into a more serious discussion with political tones when each participant interpreted their characters. It is remarkable how the very personal interpretations of the drawings were shaped by the contemporary politics of neoliberal academia and tightened migration policy. The participants read into them academic precarity, isolation, fears about expiring residency status, and problems with childcare.
The outcomes of another exercise – drawing invisible barriers – similarly could not escape the logic driven by contemporary right-wing politics. The participants drew never-ending staircases, brains, parfum bottles, and a boat on an ominously serene lake. These drawings could be read as “it is all in your head” (brain), the ostracization of a homeless person lacking personal hygiene (parfum bottles), lack of access (stairs) – all translating into visible barriers. The exercise illustrated how deeply political the personal is, highlighting the pressures of contemporary neoliberal politics on participants’ lives.
The workshop demonstrated how images communicate lived experiences of invisible barriers and in an ideal case help to ‘break’ them by making them visible and known. It also showed that academic conferences are not neutral spaces. Alongside concrete forms of exclusion, many unspoken codes and invisible hurdles shape academic spaces. It is too often assumed that the research subjects are distant “others” – outsiders to the conference venues.
Migration studies – as most research in general – focus on the outsiders of academic spaces and has been criticized for the often-extractive relationship between the researcher and the research subject (Talebi 2024; Mustonen & Scheel 2024). The contemporary moment urges a deeper engagement with those colleagues among us most affected by the violent political catastrophes of our time – the ongoing Nakba in Palestine, crimes against humanity in Sudan, the war in Ukraine, the democratic backsliding and anti-immigration turn in the United States – to name a few. These atrocities do not happen somewhere far away — but they directly impact the core of our research and the questions we (should) ask.
Meaningful scholarship in a “time of Monsters”
This year’s ETMU conference theme – ‘breaking barriers’ – cannot be separated from the broader context of an escalated state violence with regard to migration control and authoritarian tendencies that shape contemporary politics in many parts of the world. In this context, migration scholars need to rethink what constitutes meaningful scholarship.
Maura Finkelstein who was fired from her professorship at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania in the United States for her outspoken political stance in solidarity with Palestine reminds of the potential and the critical mission of scholarship “to imagine alternative futures beyond the bounds of our institutions, our borders, and our existing frameworks and then throw the weight of our creativity, our teaching, and our writing, in the direction of these horizons” (Finkelstein 2024).
Perhaps migration studies can see a new potential when connecting the study of the various migration regimes and the individual troubles (as visualized in the workshop) to the broader issues impacting human mobility in a ‘time of monsters’ (Lentin 2025; Burden-Stelley 2025; see also org. Gramsci 1930). We need to make the catastrophes of our time visible on our research agendas and explore their interconnections with European migration regimes, politics, weapon industries, and official knowledge production. In the national contexts and conference venues in the Nordic countries, these transnational connections remain conspicuously absent.
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Text by Liina Mustonen, Saara Toukolehto and Bruno Lefort
References
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