works as a student assistant in this project. She is a master’s student of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. In her field research at a Costa Rican migrant shelter she observed and participated in humanitarian and administration practices, aimed at understanding local dynamics between care, im/mobilization, and surveillance.
“The project forms the framework of my master’s thesis, in which I examine the care and control practices of police and red cross staff in a state-run shelter for transit migrants in southern Costa Rica. I am particularly interested in the employees’ local (and transnationally connected) migration management strategies and the ideological grounds that legitimise these strategies. For local staff, managing migrants in transit means balancing official rules, work ethics, emotions and affects. At the same time, they must deal with actors of so-called migration industries as well as with the discourses that racialize migrants passing through. The project helps me to better understand these various entanglements.”