Mobile Solidarities and Precariousness at City Plaza: Beyond Vulnerable and Disposable Lives

Abstract

This article explores how mobile solidarities are forged through precariousness at City Plaza, a disused hotel and collective refugee accommodation space in Athens, which has become a notorious site of resistance in the midst of the so-called “European migration crisis.” Drawing on qualitative research carried out during 2016, the article explores how solidarities are created at this space in terms that not only challenge the abandonment of lives rendered disposable through camps, but also the rendering of lives vulnerable through humanitarian accommodation initiatives that seek to integrate those most in need of protection. While pointing to the significance of critical analyses of abandoned and disposable lives in the context of current migratory conditions across Europe, the article highlights the limitations of a frame of vulnerability specifically. It draws on the work of Judith Butler to argue that the relations of solidarity which are forged at City Plaza are better understood in terms of a form of precarity or precariousness that is shared, yet unevenly distributed.

Keywords

• abandonment
• disposability
• vulnerability
• precariousness
• solidarity
• migration