Glitches, geopoetics, and the matter of migration: Regrounding beyond citizenship

This paper explores the concept of regrounding as a form of poetic justice that unsettles dominant paradigms of national citizenship. Drawing on nearly two years of institutional ethnography and participatory action research with organisations supporting migrants in northeast England, the paper develops a geopoetic method that centres material and affective practices—such as sharing tea, tending soil, and planting seeds—as modes of non-sovereign belonging. Inspired by Lauren Berlant's notion of the glitch, Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation, and Aya Nassar's geopoetic aesthetics, regrounding is introduced as a neologism that interrupts sedentarist logics and imagines alternative political attachments grounded in care, opacity, and relational infrastructures. Through three autoethnographic vignettes, the paper shows how everyday acts of co-presence and material engagement—rather than legal recognition—can compose justice and solidarity. These intimate practices challenge dominant citizenship regimes not through demands for inclusion, but through a feminist-material politics of refusal, opening space for inhabiting the world otherwise.