The "displaced other": Uncategorisable forms of mundane displacements in Athens, Greece

This thesis critically examines displacement by expanding its definition beyond conventional categories to include mundane and everyday forms of displacement, displaceability, and non-emplacement in Athens. Prevailing academic and policy frameworks often fail to capture the full spectrum of lived experiences, particularly those that elude institutional logics and theoretical categorizations.
Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, critical race studies, and discussions within anthropology, human geography, and sociolegal research, this work explores how non-normative and "unworldly" experiences of displacement - being unable to settle, place-make, or access resources - are often rendered unintelligible or forced into skewed epistemic and policy frameworks. Rather than focusing on a singular group or "community," I engage, through ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration with multiple organisations and collectives, with people positioned at various intersections of migrantization, racialization, and queerness in their everyday lives, thus challenging the assumption that displacement is merely an ontological condition tied to geographic movement. Instead, I examine how displacement operates as an ongoing, dynamic process shaped by state apparatuses and normative social narratives with the aim to not simply deconstruct the concept but to disorient it, allowing for a re-imagining of "breathable emplacement" - a conceptual space beyond the constraints of integrationist logics, which I term locus ferendus. This study also considers other facets of mundane displacement, such as the inability to experience normative time and the condition of being perpetually dischronized. Ultimately, by expanding the vocabulary surrounding displacement, this thesis seeks to broaden our epistemic resources and challenge entrenched paradigms of belonging and emplacement through a necessary epistemological queering.