Zachary Whyte
Biographic Data
| ID | 104981 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Zachary Whyte |
| GIVEN NAMES | Zachary |
| FAMILY NAME | Whyte |
| SIGNATURE | WHYTE Z |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4767-4307 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Worn Housing
Worn houses in the rural Danish municipality of Lolland are often considered signs of the marginality ascribed to the area. However, this tends to obscure important aspects of the lives lived in them and their local significance. In this article, drawing on literature on infrastructure, repair, and migration studies, we consider worn housing as ruinous, profitable, promising, and uncanny, and relate these four perspectives to the migration of peo…
Moving camps
This paper traces a cluster of asylum housing units that were shipped from Denmark to Bosnia in 1996, ostensibly to house repatriated Bosnians, and which remain in place today. That is to say, camps that were literally moved. These buildings and the logistics surrounding their movement served to structure a range of humanitarian and administrative connections both in and between Denmark and Bosnia. Instead of tracing movements, networks, and care…
You are too expensive, you need to work faster!”
Ukrainian migration to Denmark has been structured by national fast‐track programmes, predominantly funnelling Ukrainians towards low‐skilled and precarious jobs in Danish livestock production. However, since the recent Russian invasion, the introduction of Law L145 has entitled Ukrainians in Denmark to similar employment rights as the European Union citizens through an SL1 visa. While this opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Danish lab…
Automation, Biocrats, and Imaginaries in Biometric Border Worlds
This commentary reflects on the special issue on ethnographic approaches to biometric technologies. By attending to everyday experiences and understandings of the production, use, and contestation of biometric border technologies, the articles show how they are enmeshed in much wider social and cultural networks than is often presumed. I draw out three themes from the articles: automation, biometric bureaucrats (here glossed as 'biocrats'), and i…
Narrating Asylum in Camp and at Court
In Denmark, as elsewhere, narratives are central to the asylum determination procedure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter investigates the ways in which asylum seekers and asylum lawyers present and re-present asylum narratives across two contrasting narrative contexts: Danish asylum centers (“camp” to asylum seekers) and the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (“court” to asylum seekers). Distinguishing between “asylum motive” and “asylum…
New neighbours in a time of change
Asylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres' arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the…
Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum
Asylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, a…
Meetings of the Art
Cultural encounters are commonly understood as transformative meetings across difference. Drawing on four months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an art project for asylum-seeking minors at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, this paper argues that these kinds of framings may tend to overlook important interactions on either side of the meeting. I use the notion of the ‘contact zone’ (Clifford, J., 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the…
Enquete
ENQUETE: Zachary Whyte: 'Vi øver os bare
Enter the myopticon
Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Fouc…
Fake Passports and Appointed Communities
Nationality underwrites a great deal of the Danish asylum process, and of the refugee regime as a whole. The housing and care of asylum seekers, handled by the Danish Red Cross, is based on classifications by nationality. Bending a phrase from Benedict Anderson, these might be called "appointed communities". While the Danish asylum system in principle performs individual determination procedures for asylum seekers, granting refugee status on a ca…
Arguing and Justifying
New neighbours in a time of change
Asylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres' arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the…
Enter the myopticon
Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Fouc…
Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum
Asylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, a…
Automation, Biocrats, and Imaginaries in Biometric Border Worlds
This commentary reflects on the special issue on ethnographic approaches to biometric technologies. By attending to everyday experiences and understandings of the production, use, and contestation of biometric border technologies, the articles show how they are enmeshed in much wider social and cultural networks than is often presumed. I draw out three themes from the articles: automation, biometric bureaucrats (here glossed as 'biocrats'), and i…
Arguing and Justifying
Fake Passports and Appointed Communities
Nationality underwrites a great deal of the Danish asylum process, and of the refugee regime as a whole. The housing and care of asylum seekers, handled by the Danish Red Cross, is based on classifications by nationality. Bending a phrase from Benedict Anderson, these might be called "appointed communities". While the Danish asylum system in principle performs individual determination procedures for asylum seekers, granting refugee status on a ca…
Enter the myopticon
Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Fouc…
Enquete
ENQUETE: Zachary Whyte: 'Vi øver os bare
Meetings of the Art
Cultural encounters are commonly understood as transformative meetings across difference. Drawing on four months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an art project for asylum-seeking minors at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, this paper argues that these kinds of framings may tend to overlook important interactions on either side of the meeting. I use the notion of the ‘contact zone’ (Clifford, J., 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the…
Paradoxical infrastructures of asylum
Asylum policies in the Global North have increasingly turned towards populist policies of deterrence, as states attempt to make themselves seem as unattractive as possible to would-be asylum seekers. This article examines one such case: the tent camps for asylum seekers that were hastily erected in Denmark in early 2016. However, while the tent camps surely are an instance of symbolic politics, we argue that to understand their daily operation, a…
Narrating Asylum in Camp and at Court
In Denmark, as elsewhere, narratives are central to the asylum determination procedure. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter investigates the ways in which asylum seekers and asylum lawyers present and re-present asylum narratives across two contrasting narrative contexts: Danish asylum centers (“camp” to asylum seekers) and the Danish Refugee Appeals Board (“court” to asylum seekers). Distinguishing between “asylum motive” and “asylum…
New neighbours in a time of change
Asylum centres in rural areas are an increasingly common mode of managing asylum seekers in Denmark. These centres' arrival occurs in a context of protracted rural crisis, as demographic and economic changes reshape local communities. Yet research on these processes remains scarce, issues concerning asylum and the rural being seldom conceived together. At the same time, majority population attitudes towards refugees are often depicted through the…
Automation, Biocrats, and Imaginaries in Biometric Border Worlds
This commentary reflects on the special issue on ethnographic approaches to biometric technologies. By attending to everyday experiences and understandings of the production, use, and contestation of biometric border technologies, the articles show how they are enmeshed in much wider social and cultural networks than is often presumed. I draw out three themes from the articles: automation, biometric bureaucrats (here glossed as 'biocrats'), and i…
You are too expensive, you need to work faster!”
Ukrainian migration to Denmark has been structured by national fast‐track programmes, predominantly funnelling Ukrainians towards low‐skilled and precarious jobs in Danish livestock production. However, since the recent Russian invasion, the introduction of Law L145 has entitled Ukrainians in Denmark to similar employment rights as the European Union citizens through an SL1 visa. While this opens up previously inaccessible areas of the Danish lab…
Moving camps
This paper traces a cluster of asylum housing units that were shipped from Denmark to Bosnia in 1996, ostensibly to house repatriated Bosnians, and which remain in place today. That is to say, camps that were literally moved. These buildings and the logistics surrounding their movement served to structure a range of humanitarian and administrative connections both in and between Denmark and Bosnia. Instead of tracing movements, networks, and care…
Worn Housing
Worn houses in the rural Danish municipality of Lolland are often considered signs of the marginality ascribed to the area. However, this tends to obscure important aspects of the lives lived in them and their local significance. In this article, drawing on literature on infrastructure, repair, and migration studies, we consider worn housing as ruinous, profitable, promising, and uncanny, and relate these four perspectives to the migration of peo…
Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Danish (4 works) · History (4 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (4 works) · Refugee (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works) · Art (3 works) · Global Security and Public Health (3 works) · Law (3 works)