Everyday Bordering and Migrant Schooling Timescapes in Post-Crisis Athens

Abstract

This paper explores the geographies of migrant schooling in Athens following the 2015–2016 crisis, which left thousands of migrants stranded in the country. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of everyday bordering (2017–2018), I examine the school as an ordinary bureaucratic institution and as a physical space in relation to the border. I discuss the processes that rendered the schooling of racialised children a problem to be managed and solved. These migrant schooling timescapes, I argue, were marked by contradictory state logics, and temporalities, and were shaped by context-specific colonial and racialisation discourses. These tensions shaped the encounters between families on the move and the state throughout the academic year. The paper argues that the school became an everyday space of bordering, controlling membership and reproducing the families’ marginalisation. In this way, it contributes to the literature that highlights the role of ordinary institutions and temporal forms of governance conditioning migrant lives.