Gregory Feldman Libros

The Migration Apparatus examines the daily practices of European Union migration policy officials as they attempt to harmonize legal channels for labor migrants while simultaneously cracking down on illegal migration.

Based on rare, in-depth fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team working in a southern EU maritime state, Gregory Feldman examines how "taking action" against human smuggling rings requires the team to enter the "gray zone", a space where legal and policy prescriptions do not hold. Feldman asks how this seven-member team makes ethical judgments when they secretly investigate smugglers, traffickers, migrants, lawyers, shopkeepers, and many others. He asks readers to consider that gray zones create opportunities both to degrade subjects of investigations and to take unnecessary risks for them. Moving in either direction largely depends upon bureaucratic conditions and team members' willingness to see situations from a variety of perspectives. Feldman explores their personal experiences and daily work in order to crack open wider issues about sovereignty, action, ethics, and, ultimately, being human. Situated at the intersection of the EU migration apparatus and the global, clandestine networks it identifies as security threats, this book allows Feldman to outline an ethnographically-based theory of sovereign action.

Now more than ever, questions of citizenship, migration, and political action dominate public debate. In this powerful and polemical book, Gregory Feldman argues that We Are All Migrants . By challenging the division between those considered "citizens" and "migrants," Feldman shows that both subjects confront disempowerment, uncertainty, and atomization inseparable from the rise of mass society, the isolation of the laboring individual, and the global proliferation of rationalized practices of security and production. Yet, this very atomization―the ubiquitous condition of migrant-hood―pushes the individual to ask an existential and profoundly political "do I matter in this world?" Feldman argues that for particular individuals to answer this question affirmatively, they must be empowered to jointly constitute the places they inhabit with others. Feldman ultimately argues that to overcome the condition of migrant-hood, people must be empowered to constitute their own sovereign spaces from their particular standpoints. Rather than base these spaces on categorical types of people, these spaces emerge only as particular people present themselves to each other while questioning how they should inhabit it.

The book delves into the concept of the "relational subject" as an alternative to the traditional liberal individual in modernity. It examines how this perspective, intertwined with themes of nature, race, and the divine, emphasizes our interconnectedness within a global context while maintaining individual uniqueness. By embracing this understanding, it proposes a reimagining of politics and sovereignty, suggesting that true political engagement allows for personal rejuvenation and the revitalization of collective governance.