Numériser les vulnérabilités des migrants

• Main Author: Marjorie Gerbier-Aublanc
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Éditions de la Sorbonne 2020-01-01
• Series: Socio-anthropologie
• Subjects: counting; categorization; migrants; vulnerability; associative advocacy
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/5595

This article discusses the data collection process for the census of October 2016, driven by three associations in the migrant camp in Calais. In response to the government’s announcement of a complete and imminent destruction of the camp, this associative initiative aimed at pointing out the risks of an hasty and poorly prepared operation, by quantifying the multiple vulnerabilities and needs of the people settled in this place. Drawing on an immersion amongst associative volunteers, this ethnography deciphers the ambivalences and blind spots of this counting process. If the quantification of migrants’ situations was a caring and a protesting intention, the categorization chosen to that end was neither able to translate the plurality of migrants’ vulnerability feelings nor to bring to light their subjective experience of the eviction of a place that, bad or good, was then the only world that they inhabited.