Borders separating the global north from the global south has in recent years created an accelerated moment of control and confinement. This development,which contains both continuity and change, has created new and contested borderlands that give rise to particular individual, social and political forms of struggle over mobility that informs experience and designates subjective categories like migrant, smuggler, or deportee. Recent anthropological approaches have reminded us that subjectivity has not always suggested a perspective on human life as focused on inner states and individual experience, but that being a subject also means to be subjected to the ruling powers that be, whether a monarch or state power.The aim of this workshop is to bring together Danish and Nordic colleagues to revisit the political dimension of subjectivity by bringing attention to how life worlds and individual needs and desires are informed and challenged by particular socio-economic, political, and racial configurations. And how in the expanded borderlands the desire for mobility, physical as well as social and existential, is often viewed as transgressions. In fact, could migrant journeys be seen as acts of iconoclasm that challenge or tear down the dominating spatial imaginaries and therefore elicit especially hard measures?