Migrant struggles, practices of citizenship, and techniques of bordering

an inter-disciplinary workshop/ reading group

This bi-monthly seminar (meeting alternate Fridays, 2 - 4 pm; Goldsmiths,  RHB 141) is focused on the redefinition of social and political space in the light of migratory practices, inasmuch as migrants’ struggles may be understood to be political movements that challenge borders and the very logics of governing human mobility, as well as the contemporary transformations of regimes for managing migrations.  Migratory movements are effectively destabilizing the very category of the political as it has been conventionally defined in modern political theory and institutionalized by Western democracies (according to such concepts as citizenship, rights, national sovereignty, civil society, the political subject, visibility, recognition, etc.).  To what extent might migrants’ struggles be framed in terms of claims to ‘rights’ or practices of ‘citizenship’?  Or rather, is it necessary to question these very analytic categories in the face of practices that seem to elude or escape the traditional channels of politics?  In this workshop (part seminar featuring invited lectures, part collaborative reading group) -- organised by Martina Tazzioli (Politics;  martinatazzioli@yahoo.it), in collaboration with Nicholas De Genova (Anthropology), and co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Politics at Goldsmiths -- teaching and research staff and post-graduate students are invited to participate to explore these themes:

• Migrant struggles:  How may the heterogeneous practices of migrants be theorized as forms of political articulation and struggle?  This question is addressed not only to organized political movements and practices of resistance, as such, but also to the diverse and often subtle ways that the sheer autonomy of migration tends to unsettle the technologies of state power and sovereignty.
• Practices of citizenship:  If migrant struggles are indeed re-configuring the very premises and predicates of the political, are these best understood as new practices of citizenship, or alternately, do they defy and subvert citizenship altogether?  How does migrant mobility and subjectivity challenge us to reconceptualise political and social space?
• Techniques of bordering:  What are the logics of ‘border control’ and ‘migration management’?  How may we account for the emergence of human mobility as an ‘object’ to be governed?  What are the genealogies of historically specific formations, representations, and discourses of state borders, national sovereignty, and migratory movements?  These questions are addressed to both ‘immigration’, ‘integration’, and ‘assimilation’ as categories produced by state power and territoriality as well as cross-border mobility as a strategy adopted by migrants seeking to evade capture by the technologies

Workshops and speakers:

• 25 November 2011: Nicholas De Genova (Goldsmiths, University of London) ‘The perplexities of mobility’

• 20 January 2012: Federica Sossi (University of Bergamo; Italy) ‘Migrating spaces:  What we owe to Tunisian migrants’

• 10 February: Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna; Italy) ‘The multiplication of borders and border struggles in the contemporary world’

• 13 February: Kate Hepworth (University of Technology; Sydney, Australia) ‘Encounters with the clandestino/a and the nomad in Milan:The emplaced and embodied negotiation of political belonging’

• 16 February: Bernd Kasparek (University of Munich; Germany) ‘Reconstructing Schengen’

• 9 March: Rutvica Andrijasevic (University of Leicester) ‘Sex, slaves and the citizens: gender and the politics of mobility’

• 23 March: Nandita Sharma (University of Hawaii) (Title TBA)

• 18 May: Vicki Squire (Open University) (Title TBA)

• 25 May:Bridget Anderson (University of Oxford)  (Title TBA)

• 1 June: Glenda Garelli (University of Illinois-Chicago) and Alessandra Sciurba (University of Palermo) (Title TBA)