S Biros 2025

Agents and Agency at the EU and Mexico-US Borders

Our news media offer daily accounts of migration crises in the Mediterranean and North America. Yet much of the reality of human agency, mobility, and power in border regions remains unseen and unknown. What are the historical roots of the brutal inequalities manifested at international borders? How do migrants and residents of border regions survive, subsist, and exist? And who benefits from migration crises, as well as the narratives that surround them?

Our speakers will shed light on occluded realities at the borders of non-EU and EU states, and between Mexico and the United States. Dr. Polly Pallister-Wilkins will present insights from her recently published book on humanitarian responses to border violence and immigration restriction, based on eight years of research with NGO activists, professional humanitarian agencies, EU officials, and border police. Nicola Moscelli will showcase the surveillance imagery, poetry, essays, and interviews that make up his recently published photobook on the Mexico-US border. Drawing on their respective disciplines of political geography and photography, Pallister-Wilkins and Moscelli will speak to common issues of colonial history, human vulnerabilities, and the intended—and unintended—consequences of inaction and reaction to migration crises.

This programme is organised by the America in the World research group, which is a part of the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies.

About the speakers

Polly Pallister-Wilkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Amsterdam and a Research Associate in Political Studies at Wits University, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on humanitarianism’s intersections with injustice, attempts at decolonisation, and humanitarian futures. Her recent book Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives published by Verso won the 2023 International Political Sociology book award.

Nicola Moscelli is an Italian photographer and documentarist based in the Netherlands. A self-taught artist, he initially explored analogue film before focusing on visual narratives that merge photography and archival material. His work examines identity, history, and cultural legacies. He is the author of Dead End (Penisola Edizioni, 2024), a visual documentary book on US-Mexico border, shortlisted for the Aperture-Paris Photo PhotoBook Awards.

Katy Hull (moderator) is Assistant Professor of Modern Gender History in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her first book was The Machine Has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism (Princeton University Press, 2021). Her current research project investigates the construction of emotions in New Left activist autobiographies.