Entangling the Migration and the Economic ‘Crisis’: Claiming What’s Rightfully Greek

Abstract

After almost a decade of austerity, and well within the fourth year of the migration crisis, Greek society has been persistently threatened by ‘Others’, internal and external. This contribution focuses on how the entanglement of the two crises morphs the contemporary modalities of racism and xenophobia in the country. Our aim is to employ the binaries of exclusion/inclusion to explore how the crises are negotiated, interchangeably and simultaneously – yet following correlating argumentations – to justify or even motivate hostile tendencies towards the ‘other’. In the dangerously delicate process of managing a crisis, the entanglement of finances and migration becomes further nuanced as the migrant is not only perceived to threaten a precarious economy but, mainly, a precarious identity. From a methodological perspective, we argue that the analysis on the effects of two related yet distinct crises by the authors results in a coinciding exploration of racism as a common effect. The benefit of this process is found in the constant exchange of insight and the duality of the analytical lens – either in the phase of collection or interpretation of data.