ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to articulate the women’s positions, within an at once hospitable and hostile space, between belonging and exclusion. It focuses on the women’s mobility, solidarity, and home-making at Kongsvinger as resilience. The chapter argues that resilience may offer a way to approach alternative politics, by emphasizing other ways of being in and knowing the world, and acknowledging alternative forms of belonging, membership, or citizenship beyond the categories and legal definitions of the sovereign state. The dialectic of hospitality and hostility, reflective of current tensions in managing migration, is also manifested at Kongsvinger, Norway’s prison holding foreign nationals only. The chapter addresses the ambivalence inherent to Kongsvinger prison, a welfare crimmigration prison. Legal status among migrants is often incongruent with their everyday lives and social worlds, although ‘illegality’ is not simply a legal condition, but decidedly affects the migrants ‘ways of being in the world’.
