Counter-mapping, refugees and asylum borders

The aim of this article is to mobilise a counter-mapping approach with respect to the normative geographies of the asylum system, and to explore firstly what “counter” means in the context of a critical cartography of migration, and then to unpack the main theoretical and political tenets such a methodological perspective mobilizes against. Our take on counter-mapping relies on what we would call a reflexive cartography, meaning by that an analysis that does not consist only in a cartographic practice, but that, rather, interrogates the predicaments and the implications of mapping migration. More precisely, counter-mapping is for us a “reflexive practice” (Foucault, 1968), that is a methodological approach that unsettles and unpacks the spatial assumptions upon which migration maps are crafted. Moreover we also refer to cartographic experimentations that trouble the spatial and temporal fixes of a state-based gaze on migration. In sum, counter-mapping as a method and counter-mapping as a cartographic experimentation intertwine as part of our critical account of the visualisations of migration and refugee issues.