The governance of borders and belonging increasingly occurs through affective forms of biopolitics – be it the politicization of feelings of kinship or the shaping of migration politics in the name of love and fear. Thus, on the heels of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in 2015, efforts were made to contain and regulate migrants through fear of the racialized male asylum seeker and were distributed through popular representations of sexual harassment and violence perpetrated by (people who were thought to be) asylum seekers. Yet the same ‘refugee crisis’ also gave rise to affective investments of compassion and solidarity as citizen initiatives were mobilized in support of refugees. Furthermore, love, family, and kinship have become battlefields for regulating and containing racialized migrant populations across the Global North, from the implementation of attachment and integration requirements in Denmark to the forced separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border.

In the light of such developments, scholarship on the regulation of social categories and structural inequalities increasingly considers how such categories and structures are organized through affective economies and in relation to emotional ideals. By the same token, scholarship on biopolitical regulation must consider how the macro- and micro-levels of affective governmentality are imbricated in gendered, racialized, and sexualized structures. In other words: How can we conceptualize and analyse the connections between affect, biopolitics, and borders?

This conference invites researchers from a wide range of disciplines to investigate how and to what effects areas such as nation, migration, borders, belonging, kinship, communities, and diaspora are conceptually and politically governed through affect at a time in which racist and anti-immigration politics are on the rise in many parts of the world.