Based on interviews and ethnographic research with Ukrainian female domestic workers in Italy, this chapter looks into the often taboo topic – intimate, romantic, and sexual relations formed in the course of migration by women migrating alone. These relations are often seen as a side product of ‘proper care-work’ and as ‘inappropriate transgressions’. The chapter aims to maintain the complexity of such encounters by contextualising a wide range of intimate relationships as power relations of uncertain economic situations, dismantling the dichotomy of paid vs unpaid sexual relations and scrutinising the boundaries of care work. Drawing a complex picture of sexual, romantic, and intimate encounters between migrant women and local men with various motivations, degrees of exploitation, and rewards on both sides, this chapter steps away from the ‘trauma of separation from family’ perspective, often dominating the discussion of the experience of female migration, and shifts the gaze towards women’s personal ambitions and desires in migration.

The chapter addresses the recent proliferation of border-related visual art and the problem of resisting political power in particular. Border art is a medium that is both aesthetic and political, addressing through images the processes of de/bordering and borderscapes, as well as its potential for making visible and even subverting experiences and expectations related to the border. The chapter reviews critically several instances of border art from Europe to the United States and Canada (e.g., by Adrien Missika and Dennis Oppenheim), showing that in contemporary border art borders are a topos, that is, the anchor point of a multidimensional message. In so doing, it also highlights the links between the different aesthetic productions at the borders at the global level. The chapter claims that there is a new need to reflect on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, should an understanding of border art as a form of ‘alternative spatiality’ offering potential for subversion and critique be aimed at. What are shown as powerful ways of promoting non-consensual understandings of borders in the visual arts are works that critique the medium, not only border politics, or are non-representational.

This chapter written by the editors examines how the individual contributions to this volume answer the book’s three basic questions about different aesthetic strategies, how they enable crossings from private experience into the public sphere, and the various paradoxes they involve. The ways in which they answer these questions connect the different chapters with each other. Here the editors also suggest possible ways forward for future research, or themes that need a closer focus. It is argued that, in addition to the need to broaden the focus to other forms of aesthetic experience than those prototypically characterised as ‘images’ and ‘narratives’, it is crucial to examine in more detail how border images and narratives act in the world, focus on the temporalities of such images and narratives, and also explore their emotional dimensions.

Chapter 5 assesses how northern soul was practised and experienced by its participants, focusing on the centrality of DJs to the scene, their relationship with fans and the way in which fans lived and related to northern soul, including its well-documented involvement with illegal drug abuse. It explains how northern soul’s perception of itself as ‘different’ and detached conflicted with what were viewed by many as attempts to commercialise the scene. This contributed to the emergence of cleavages and tensions and to the development of a form of ‘penny capitalism’ that was complemented by the entrepreneurial pursuit of profit through the sale of rare recordings. Such activity strengthened the transatlantic links that the scene had engendered between Britain and several North American cities and resulted in the enhancement or rehabilitation of a number of US artistic careers. However, it was specific commercial practices relating to recordings that undermined the rhetorical discourse of ‘togetherness’ apparent in northern soul. The chapter evaluates the tensions within the scene and determines the extent to which commercialisation and the scene’s association with illegal drugs led to its demise.

This chapter analyses politics and areas of inclusionary/exclusionary practices in reproductive healthcare – in particular assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) experienced by recent Polish migrant women in Berlin and Oslo. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted among Polish female migrants. First, it discusses reproductive politics in Poland in relation to ARTs and discourses on migration, depopulation, and reproduction. Migration from Poland often leads to improvement in reproductive rights because migrants gain access to programmes which are not (or are less) available in present-day Poland. Second, it analyses whether access to ARTs abroad is easy, what migrating Polish women think about ART reproduction, and whether they are aware of and influenced by the discourse on moral governmentality enforced by the Catholic church and conservative groups in Poland. It argues that increasing mobility and transnational lifestyle may result in challenges over access to local healthcare systems but also create new solutions. The experiences of a few women (and couples) show that there are aspects of power and agency in both inclusionary and exclusionary situations of regulating human bodies in the sphere of reproduction. Therefore, migration leads to dynamic situations, ambiguities, and constraints in gendered reproductive rights and related ideologies.

This chapter examines the aesthetics of the border by focusing on spatial border figures in situations where the sense of borders as constructs that articulate spatial frames and generate an impression of realism fails to provide this function. By analysing a set of twentieth-century fantastic narratives written in Spanish, French and English that mediate between realities and imaginaries in their treatment of borders, it examines their discourse of boundaries ontologically, narratologically and thematically. What is of particular interest is the function of two specific tropes that transgress the ‘realistic’ system of boundaries, operating according to the physics and logics of our extratextual world: horizontal vertigo – the loss of the border that puts an end to a physical space – and spatial psychasthenia – fusion of the body in space. Through analyses of fantastic texts by J.G. Ballard, Rosa Chacel and the TV episode ‘El asfalto’ from the classic Spanish series Historias para no dormir, the chapter shows the relevance of the fantastic for understanding of these border figures as well as border narratives and the configuration of human spatiality more generally.

The chapter examines the spectacularisation of Mediterranean borderscapes evident in the dramatic staging of refugee crises and migrant deaths in the Mediterranean in the media in particular. On the basis of the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, this spectacularisation is understood as a part of a ‘politics of in/visibility’ that frames political subjects as either relevant or negligible through processes of making in/visible at the shifting threshold between what is worthy of being seen and what is not, which is evidenced in the limited public visibility and agency of migrants and refugees, as well as of civil society, groups and individuals inhabiting Mediterranean borderscapes. On the basis of collaborative ethnographic research with young people in the Italian/Tunisian borderland addressing their images and narratives of borders, the chapter presents a borderscaping approach aiming to de-spectacularise images and narratives of Mediterranean borderscapes. It shows how mixed collaborative visual methods enable possible ‘tactics’ for negotiating regimes of in/visibility to restore public visibility agency that will allow for new forms of political participation and subjectivity. In this way, Mediterranean borderscapes emerge as a space of political becoming where new forms of performative political participation can be developed.

The very term ‘northern soul’ suggests that the scene was regionally specific. The origins of northern soul might have been located in the English north and midlands, but it had a substantial following in other parts of Britain. The first section of this chapter maps the geography of northern soul. It adds to the growing literature on the resilience of regional identities in post-war Britain and how this was imprinted on northern soul. It uncovers the complexities relating to the scene’s geographical specificity and whether this was related to a set of particular structural, cultural and political factors. Northern soul was often connected to other tropes of northernness such as coal mining, Labour politics and particular forms of working-class culture. Drawing on previously unused fanzines and oral testimony, the chapter charts the ways in which the scene became part of a mythologised north.

The chapter explores the multiple worlds in which migrants live while working as badanti, live-in home careworkers for the elderly in an average-sized town in southeast Italy. The chapter focuses on descriptions of day-to-day activities of migrant careworkers but also on spectacular events such as the organisation of ‘The Party of the Counter Hour,’ an event set up by the protagonist of this chapter, a Romanian careworker, with support from a local Italian cultural association and the author. The central argument of the chapter is that the juxtaposition of different regimes of life and work makes explicit the clash within the experience of migrant careworkers’ worlds. In Italy, migrants inhabit the houses of their employers, but paradoxically, live in separate worlds from these. At the same time, while in Italy, migrant careworkers constantly think of and invest in a particular household and extended kin group in Romania. These long term economic, financial, and moral ties make even more visible the multiple worlds in which migrants live while working as badanti in Italy.

In Norway, the majority population has generally accepted and internalised gender egalitarian values. Public childcare is universal and plays an important role in work–family balance. Among the majority population, the male breadwinner model is being replaced by a double earner/double carer model. As a result, gender traditional family models have been contested and are often associated with migrant families. Local care and welfare policies aim to integrate women and migrants into the labour market and children into local communities. For migrant mothers who come from European contexts dominated by the Catholic church and gender conservative family values, developing new care practices in Norway can cause social tensions, transnational challenges, as well as individual empowerment. This chapter discusses how local gender policies and access to universal childcare arrangements in Norway influence Polish and Italian mothers’ migration experiences.

The project for Critical International Relations is to provide practical solutions and thinking for our current troubled times. In the light of an acknowledged failure to develop an emancipatory practice, the chapter suggests a possible way forward for the approach, drawing on the critique of the west provided by Frankfurt School influenced thinking and the work of Michel Foucault. When combined with posthumanist thinking which encourages us to look beyond the human, the chapter suggests an engagement with forms of non-Western thinking.

This chapter looks at the functioning and effects of border regimes in relation to marriage migration from rural Kosovo to Western Europe, and here especially to Germany and Austria, which restricted the opportunities for marriage migration considerably over recent years. The restrictions are based on gendered and ethnicised assumptions of marriage migration as being patriarchal and a threat to German and Austrian society. Shedding light on a rather unexplored perspective, the chapter focuses on young women in Kosovo’s south, who aim to move to Western Europe via marriage, and the barriers they meet and struggle to overcome. It explores how prospective migrants position themselves towards marriage migration, and how they experience the increasingly restrictive European border regime in terms of family and marriage migration. It furthermore questions the meaning of polity borders in such intimate realms as marriage. The chapter argues that with the new policies and measures concerning marriage migration, Western European states externalise their borders and put enormous pressure on prospective marriage migrants. These borders, partly gendered, can be bodily felt, often postpone migration, and may alienate partners. Contrary to the stated aims of such policies, these measures do not necessarily support women in their free choices in intimate realms, but interfere in intimacies and restrict their agency. Still, women also act as agents by relying on family support in order to realise their imaginations, or by choosing exit strategies when the pressure on them becomes too burdensome or realities are too far away from their imaginations.

In order to clarify the use of the term critical theory, this chapter looks at some examples from mainstream International Relations. Neorealism is taken as the paradigmatic example of a problem-solving or traditional theory. The chapter will assess why that is so, and examine whether there are any grounds for challenging that view. A more hard test case would be Social Constructivism, and the chapter will assess the extent to which this approach could be considered a critical theory and on what grounds. The aim of the chapter is to indicate that a hard distinction between critical theory and problem-solving theory is hard to sustain and that perhaps all theory contains some mixture of critical and problem-solving elements – though in different combinations.