Mobile and Disappearing Migrant Geographies: Reflections on Makeshift Camp Fragments and Methodologies

ABSTRACT Along clandestine journeys, migrants occupy a whole variety of temporary and informal dwellings or ‘makeshift camps’, where they may rest, wait, gather resources and make further attempts at crossing the borders and reaching destinations. Makeshift camps have proliferated across cities and border‐zones around Europe, becoming widely recognised as crucial geographies of contemporary migration, as nodes for migrant strategy and mobilities, solidarities and smuggling, temporary social and political orderings as well as all kinds of violence to which residents are exposed. Yet these spaces are also understood as inherently fleeting and mobile, characterised by constant police evictions and destruction, the abandonment or departure of their residents, the relocation and vanishing of structures formerly occupied – all of which make them difficult to study. Drawing upon extensive multi‐sited ethnographic research across a variety of makeshift camps (past and present) in the border city of Bihać, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this paper considers methodological questions of how to examine migrants' informal dwellings en route whose upheaval and ephemerality has emerged, not as an aberration, but as a constant thread over the last several years. Within a context of acute transience, shape‐shifting and disappearance, this paper offers methodological reflections on rendering visible the fleeting and subversive geographies of makeshift camps while maintaining a steadfast commitment to not expose the strategies and hiding places of residents in ways that would compromise their safety, privacy or success along their clandestine journeys.