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This article aims to explore the multiple uses and consequences of different technologies and infrastructures in the context of migrations and how such uses and consequences inhabit and transform migrants' rights and subjectivities. It reviews relevant literature at the intersection of citizenship, critical migration studies and science and technology studies (STS), focusing in particular on the current debates underway within critical citizenship studies that examine how technologies and infrastructures shape the ability to acts of citizenship. By mobilizing insights from STS, we focus on how these political subjectivities are shaped by certain sociomaterial and epistemic practices. By introducing the notion of material citizenship politics, the article outlines a way to differentiate three different constitutive forms between technologies, infrastructures and citizenship in migrations. Technologies and infrastructures can (1) constrain acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes; (2) constitute contestation and participation over citizenship; or (3) enable and shape alternative acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes. As it provides a theoretical background to the special issue, the article also serves as the introduction to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reflect on the impossibilities of intercultural communication implied in institutional medical encounters. Drawing from an ethnographic case study among patients of a transcultural consultation for migrants in Portugal, the analysis focuses on the contents and forms of the interaction observed by the anthropologist in the clinical setting. A repetitive pattern of communication between a refugee women patient and her psychiatrist foregrounded the unsaid within the interaction as well as the unwillingness of the refugee to speak about her life with the anthropologist. In this sense, we propose to understand silence as a form of communication pointing to both the condition of the patient but more significantly embedded in the institutional framework of the clinical setting, discursive positions of the participants, as well as their social statuses. Following the theoretical work of Jaworski, Wagner and Winter, our analysis of silence leads us to the critical examination of the question of privilege in intercultural situations pointing to a necessary deconstruction of post-colonial institutional object/subject positions. In practical terms, this challenge corresponds to the work of international cross-cultural psychiatry (in terms of clinical matters) as well as that of biographical research and research on memory among migrants and refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]