Crises are not events but moments that make visible internal contradictions.
COVID-19 offered such a moment of crisis. It exposed the infrastructures of (im)mobilities, their components, their failures, and how they had always been tenuous and wrought with issues. It revealed that migrants always had to negotiate these tenuous infrastructures, and the pandemic increased the intensity of that experience of migrant spatial and temporal precarity.
Though the pandemic as one moment of crisis is over, and the work of repair has started, the infrastructures of (im)mobilities for migrants continue to be tenuous and failing. And so, we are left with two questions: What could be functioning infrastructures of (im)mobilities that centre migrants look like? Who is responsible for this repair work?
Dr Gunjan Sondhi is a Senior lecturer in Geography at The Open University, UK. Her work is embedded within feminist scholarship and critical approaches to migration and mobility. Her research is concerned with the relationship between gender, mobility, work and education. This work has stretched across the globe into and across countries of North America, Europe, South and Southeast Asia. Previously, Gunjan has held research positions at York University, Canada and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Recently, she has published in IOM's journal Migration Policy Practice and contributed to an ILO-funded report Indian Women's Migration to the EU.
Presently, she co-leads the Open University's Migration group, and is a board member of IMISCOE's Standing committee on Reflexivities in Migration Studies.