AT THE EDGES OF EUROPE: MIGRATION, CARE WORK AND EMBODIED INTERVENTIONS IN CYPRUS’ BORDERSCAPE

Cyprus, like other islands in the Mediterranean Sea, has come to be at the heart of pressing struggles over freedom of movement and belonging. In recent decades, Cyprus as a critical destination for asylum seekers reaching Europe has clashed with the island’s position at the edge of ‘Fortress Europe’ – a concept capturing the racialized underpinnings of who is welcome in Europe, and making already treacherous migration journeys more dangerous. This dissertation engages with the politics of borders and asylum seeking at the edges of Europe in Cyprus through a lens of intimate and embodied life. Working with the concept of the ‘borderscape’ throughout each of my chapters, I focus on how borders present in daily life as mobile, relational and lived. My first two chapters engage materials and learning developed through in-depth ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork with migrant support organizations in Nicosia, Cyprus’ partitioned capital city, where I closely observed the day-to-day activities of care workers – a collection of social workers, lawyers, translators, psychologists, employment specialists, language teachers and aid distributors. Local migrant support organizations were key spaces of intimate geopolitical negotiation in which care workers and migrants repeatedly came up against institutional, legal, and funding constraints endemic to border spaces and humanitarian projects. Care workers and migrants navigated – often incompletely and imperfectly – the pressures of a border regime designed to be opaque, dysfunctional and hostile. Rather than abstract policies, the ‘border regime’ was intimately felt, produced and contested in day-to-day interactions and shaped by a borderscape formed over time through Cyprus’ multiple colonial occupations and its own ‘Green Line’ dividing the island since 1974. Beyond care encounters, my final chapter examines how those living in Nicosia’s borderscape, including migrants, experiment with other ways to process and contest the island’s borders through creative interventions in music and art. This dissertation contributes to geographical understandings of borderscapes by centering embodied experiences and care encounters as sites where borders are made, felt, and contested. In doing so, it also documents the quiet, imaginative ways that migrants, care workers, and artists work against the grain of hostile border regimes in everyday life.