Making Places Inbetween

The global border regimes threaten to escalate, and state-controlled refugee camps dominate the discourse while contrary viewpoints seem to be missing. Focusing on autonomous settlements in France, Italy, and Chile, Melanie Garland follows how communities on the move transform so-called non-places into social places through practices of inbetweenness, resisting border regimes and creating sites of belonging and political imagination. Attuned to the oceans connecting these places, her study draws on artistic and multimodal anthropology to develop a holistic approach that combines sensory and affective methods to explore these urban practices. It offers insights for social sciences, the arts, and readers interested in urban future-making shaped by collective agency.

Melanie Garland is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and lecturer based in Berlin. She completed her PhD at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and holds advanced training in cultural heritage restoration and conservation, museum and archival practices, and a background in visual art. Her research is situated within European Ethnology and anthropology, postcolonial and postmigrant studies, critical geography, and urban studies, with a focus on border regimes, placemaking, and informal urban settlements in Europe and South America. Her research interests also include museum and archival practices, decolonial methodologies, and multisensory and multispecies approaches to urban, oceanic, and desert ecologies.