Unrecognized Refugees and Geographies of Asylum
Geography 542
Winter 2015 | Wednesdays, 2:30-5:20
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Being viewed as a potential threat diminishes you, fractures a personal landscape, peels off pieces of bark until you are raw. You begin to suspect your own legitimacy, your place in the long, snaking lines of mainly brown people waiting for their numbers to come up. Are you trying to sneak through a keyhole into a society that doesn’t want you? are you in the shadows of illegality? could they deport you? could they separate you from your children? could they make you disappear? (Nealie, 2014) |
According to US Customs and Border Protection, more than 68,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the southwest US-Mexico border last fiscal year, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. This “humanitarian” crisis has captured media representations and produced US imaginaries in a manner that far outweighs the 11 million unauthorized immigrants already living in the US. I am working on developing a new research project that seeks to build on this recent political opening, and I hope to use this seminar to create a community of learning where we share the key questions we are grappling with and ask how to operationalize “big ideas” into feasible research projects.
Readings will employ postcolonial, feminist and critical race theories to address some of the following questions: What are key sites for performance of state sovereignty? How does our current conjuncture shape crisis narratives that legitimate racialized criminalization? Potential crisis narratives include the Drug War, gang wars, and the War on Terror. How do marginalized subjects seek to make themselves legible as refugees through legal processes? Looking beyond the “social group” category, what are other ways that unrecognized refugees make rights claims in their home countries and abroad?
Readings will employ postcolonial, feminist and critical race theories to address some of the following questions: What are key sites for performance of state sovereignty? How does our current conjuncture shape crisis narratives that legitimate racialized criminalization? Potential crisis narratives include the Drug War, gang wars, and the War on Terror. How do marginalized subjects seek to make themselves legible as refugees through legal processes? Looking beyond the “social group” category, what are other ways that unrecognized refugees make rights claims in their home countries and abroad?
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