TURNING THE GAZE UPON POWER: REFUSAL AS RESEARCH IN/TO AND AGAINST THE EU BORDER REGIME By discoversociety April 01, 2020 Aila Spathopoulou and Isabel Meier When Mira arrived in Berlin in 2015 to apply for asylum, and saw how bad the living conditions in the overcrowded camp spaces were, she got involved in several activist groups immediately. After one year of putting all her energy into asylum regime struggles, Mira stopped attending events and meetings as she got tired of the existing power dynamics within these spaces: “People with secure status take up too much space and the situation of asylum seekers is not taken into consideration when organising protest events!” Amir works as a ‘cultural mediator’ for a non-governmental organization at Samos’s hotspot. According to Amir’s boss “mediators must present as with a complete and exact translation, nothing less and nothing more, we cannot afford an incomplete translation”. However, there were instances when Amir refused to become what he described a “passive translation machine” by providing among the ‘cracks’ of translation the asylum applicant with additional information that he knew would help her to escape the unbearable situation at the hotspot. One morning, Nikitas, who worked as a cultural mediator on Lesvos, received a phone call from the police station in Mytilene town (Lesvos) asking him to come and translate for three people from Morocco who they had arrested from Moria hotspot. Nikitas, however, refused to go, because in his words “I