CFP AAG Annual Conference 2015, Chicago, IL
Enforcement Infrastructures: Emerging Political Economies of Immigration, Borders, and Security
Organizer: Lauren Martin, University of Oulu, Finland
What was once defined by a bipolar tension between liberty and security is now described as an assemblage of financial, governmental, and legal practices in which notions of risk, potentiality, and calculable futures travel amongst economic, security, and geopolitical institutions (Amoore 2013, De Goede 2012). Meanwhile, research on migration, labor, and immigration enforcement bears evidence that enforcement actions suppress wages and help to produce a docile, low-wage working class (De Genova 2002, Harrison and Lloyd 2012). In addition, a host of intermediaries—public, private, for-profit, non-profit—have taken on the daily work of detaining, processing, and deporting people: counties and provinces, urban police forces, for-profit firms, non-profit humanitarian organizations, and a wide array service providers working in detention and accommodation centres (Flynn and Cannon 2009, Hiemstra and Conlon forthcoming). Border walls and border policing use military equipment and personnel, while prisons and residential facilities are converted into detention centers (Jones 2012, Mountz et al. 2013). Policing tactics with long histories of racial discriminations, such as traffic stops and ID checks, become immigration enforcement measures (Coleman 2009). Likewise, laws and policies unrelated to immigration status become de facto immigration regulations (Varsanyi et al. 2012), and legal practices travel between states (Flynn 2014).
The blurring and borrowing of financial risk analysis, surveillance technologies, databanking, immigration inspections, urban policing, labor politics, and legal frameworks has demanded new approaches to the political economies of security. This session seeks both empirical and theoretical papers that shed new light on these political economies.
Possible topics include:
- linkages between surveillance, risk analysis, and enforcement measures
- unexpected sites of immigration and border policing
- new actors in immigration and border enforcement
- extralegal immigration law and de facto enforcement
- public policy as immigration policy
- ways of seeing, sensing migrants
- architectures of enforcement: roads, sidewalks, transportation, housing
- theorizations of political economies of security
To participate please send your 250 word abstract and contact information to Lauren Martin (lauren.martin (at) oulu.fi) by October 23, 2014.
References:
- Amoore, L. 2013. Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- De Genova, N. 2002. “Immigrant Illegality and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419-447.
- De Goede, M. 2012. Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Flynn, M. 2014. How and Why Immigration Detention Crossed the Globe. Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 8. April 2014. http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/publications/Flynn_diffusion_WorkingPaper_v2.pdf
- Flynn, M. and C. Cannon. 2009. “The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View,” Global Detention Project Working Paper No. 1, September 2009. http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/docs/GDP_PrivatizationPaper_Final5.pdf.
- Jones, R. 2012. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. Zed Books: London.
- Harrison, J.L. and S. Lloyd. 2012. “Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration,” Antipode 44(2): 365-385.
- Mountz, A, K Coddington, RT Catania, J Loyd. 2013. “Conceptualizing detention: Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion,” Progress in Human Geography 37(4): 522-541.
- Varsanyi, M., P.G. Lewis, D. Provine, S. Decker. 2010. “A Multi-layered Jurisdictional Patchwork: Immigration Federalism in the United States.” Law and Policy 34(2): 138-158.