Annual Event Series: “Spectral Borders: How European Airports Became Non-Places and Real Borders” with Dr. Lauren Stokes
In this talk, Lauren Stokes will outline the history of asylum-seekers at European airports, a history which began in the 1970s and which has continued—with significant modifications—into the present. The UNHCR dubbed these people “jet age refugees,” and they catalyzed transformations in the way that airports work.
The talk will contextualize anthropologist Marc Augé’s influential but controversial 1992 claim that airports are “non-places” by foregrounding contemporaneous legal struggles over whether airports were sovereign territory or so many states of exception to the state system of sovereignty.
Lauren Stokes is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches classes on German history, migration history, and the history of gender and sexuality. She has written Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford University Press, 2022) and is currently at work on a new project about the history of airports in Europe.
In the 2023-24 academic year, the Center’s annual event series revolves around the theme of “Borders and Boundaries.” Heightened uncertainty about cooperation within the EU, and about the stability of the international system, often seems to translate into animosities about nearby others. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has posed anew the question of what is Europe and where does it end, and the long-awaited migration deal concluded by EU member states in June 2023 focused attention on the costs and compromises entailed by the securing of borders for a European community of values. These are only two flashpoints in a longer debate about Europe’s borders and boundaries, veering between aspirations to cosmopolitanism and anxieties about migration. We have invited scholars from history, political science, economics, sociology, and cultural studies to reflect on historical and contemporary dimensions of the topic.