At the Limits of Migrant Justice, Resistance, and Solidarity
Sessions - Calls for Participants
At the Limits of Migrant Justice, Resistance, and Solidarity
Session organisers: Leah Montange (University of Toronto) & Sarah M. Hughes (Durham University, UK).
The political acts, subjectivities, and contestations of migrating or border crossing people has become an increasingly pervasive theme within and beyond Political Geography. Scholars have attended to how migrants without formal citizenship are able to demand rights (see McNevin 2011; Sigvardsdotter 2013; Mountz et al. 2013); make their political voices heard through, for example, protests and the occupation of buildings (see Walters 2010; Nyers 2008); and enact themselves as citizens (see Isin and Nielsen 2008; Anderson et al. 2011). There is however, often a tension present in this literature concerning whether migrating people are enacting a form of citizenship and/or a mode of political subjectivity that is beyond or beside citizenship (see Squire 2015; Erensu 2016). Further, literatures from ethnic and migration studies offer yet another frame for interpreting the ways that border crossing people interact with power structures that seek to shape, their geographic mobilities (see Menjívar 2006; Chauvin and Garcés-Mascreñas 2014). This literature especially attends to how various forms of legality, illegality, and racialization (also varied) impact upon the way people are read, and the hierarchization of life chances. One key focus here has been migrant peoples’ navigation of legal (and illegal) violence and the negotiation of racial regimes (see Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Ybarra 2018).
These frameworks for reading the politics of migrant and border crossing life give us an angle and language for understanding the politics of migration and border crossing activity. We ask in this session what do such terms as ‘acts’, ‘justice’, ‘resistance’ or ‘solidarity’ do in our research? What might be the limits of these categories? And what might be the political implications of deploying them? Our session therefore seeks to critically engage with these debates around the politics of migration, through empirically based geographical research. We are particularly interested in work that:
-topically ranges anywhere from collective struggles of border crossing or migrating people to everyday practices of navigating state violence
-addresses strategies around and navigations of border enforcement, and the relationship of these strategies with what comes to be termed ‘resistance’
-addresses contexts within and beyond the Global North
-considers border crossers’ or migrants’ oppressions and obstacles alongside those of marginalized or racialized citizens
- problematizes an emphasis on migrants’ resistance and agency, or that challenges the romanticization of experiences that are precarious
- considers the weight of retaliation and risk in the actions and resistance of border crossers or migrants
- considers solidarity or allyship (including the limits of solidarity or allyship) on the part of citizens
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Leah Montange (leah.montange@mail.utoronto.ca) and Sarah M. Hughes (s.m.hughes@durham.ac.uk) by the 9th February 2019.
Works Cited:
Anderson, Bridget, Matthew J. Gibney, and Emanuela Paoletti. 2011. “Boundaries of Belonging:
Deportation and the Constitution and Contestation of Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 15(5): 543–45.
Chauvin, Sébastien, and Blanca Garcés‐Mascareñas. 2012. “Beyond Informal Citizenship: The New Moral Economy of Migrant Illegality1.” International Political Sociology 6 (3): 241–59.
Erensu, Asli Ikizoglu. 2016. “Notes from a Refugee Protest: Ambivalences of Resisting and Desiring Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 20 (5): 664–77.
Isin, Engin F., and Greg Marc Nielsen, eds. 2008. Acts of Citizenship. New York: Distributed in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan.
McNevin, Anne. 2011. Contesting Citizenship : Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political. New York: Columbia University Press.
Menjívar, Cecilia, and Leisy J. Abrego. 2012. “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (5): 1380–1421.
Menjívar, Cecilia. 2006. “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111 (4): 999–1037.
Mountz, Alison., Kate. Coddington, R. Tina. Catania, and Jenna. M. Loyd. 2013.
“Conceptualizing Detention: Mobility, Containment, Bordering, and Exclusion.” Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 522–541.
Sigvardsdotter, Erika. 2013. “Presenting Absent Bodies: Undocumented Persons Coping and Resisting in Sweden.” Cultural Geographies 20(4): 523–39.
Squire, Vicki. 2015. “Acts of Desertion: Abandonment and Renouncement at the Sonoran Borderzone.” Antipode 47 (2) 500-516.
Ybarra, Megan. 2018. “‘We Are Not Ignorant’: Transnational Migrants’ Experiences of Racialized Securitization.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Early Advanced publication:https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818819006