Governing Migration and Climate through Crisis: Legal–Semiotic Regimes of In/Visibility and Access in the EU’s Peripheral Frontiers
Location:
Moot Court Room
Old College
Date/time
Fri 5 June 2026
11:00-13:00
This event is hosted by Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law
In the past two decades, multiple crises have shaped the juridico-political landscape of the European Union (EU) and its Member States. These phenomena are routinely framed by authorities as emergencies requiring extraordinary and urgent responses, often obscuring their implications for migrants and refugees as rights-bearing subjects. In this presentation, Osso examines the socio-legal implications of two crisis-mediated governance logics—the so-called “migration crisis” and the climate crisis—and how they are both shaped by and justified through legal–semiotic regimes of in/visibility in the EU migration governance. Drawing on a multi-sited socio-legal methodology, she addresses two interrelated bordering regimes located at the EU’s peripheral frontiers: overt containment of refugees in the Greek hotspot islands and covert precarization of migrant workers in Finnish Lapland’s green sectors. While emerging from distinct crisis narratives, both regimes operate through semiotic practices that mobilize highly visible signs—such as nationality, race, and skill—to selectively render migrants and refugees hypervisible as risks or economic utilities and invisibilize them as subjects with rights. She argues that these crisis-driven bordering practices reproduce a persistent crisis of visuality and access across EU migration and labor governance, and concludes by showing how counter-visual, bottom-up practices can challenge dominant crisis narratives and their legal–semiotic effects.
About the speaker
Dr. Berfin Nur Osso is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Law, with an interdisciplinary background and a Doctor of Laws (with distinction) from the same university. She currently works in the Reconceptualizing Boundaries Together Towards Resilient and Just Arctic Future(s) – REBOUND project, a six-year research consortium (2023–2029) funded by the Finnish Strategic Research Council, where she examines the justice implications of the green transition from the perspective of migrant and refugee workers in the Finnish Arctic.
Image credit: Freepik