'Contested Creation': Assessing the role of health in shaping migration governance systems

Conceptualising migration governance as a highly mobile, reactive, and liminal space of ‘contested creation’ this article examines the central, yet relatively unexplored, role of health. Utilising a Foucauldian understanding of power as relational and productive, the article illustrates how migratory spaces, practices, and experiences are created and recreated by the ‘filtration apparatus’ and those seeking to subvert it. Within this fluid interplay, the health of the body and population enable the state to filter and classify while simultaneously providing avenues for subversive resistance. Through this duality, health contributes to an asymmetrically experienced yet contested and evolving ‘borderscape’—constantly in a state of ‘becoming’.