Reminder: Call for Papers
Citizenship Studies Special Issue: IMMIGRANT PROTEST
Guest co-editors: Katarzyna Marciniak (Ohio
University, USA) and Imogen Tyler (Lancaster University, UK)
(slated for publication in 2011)
This proposed special issue on immigrant protest
will explore forms of dissent, resistance and
revolt amongst citizens and non-citizens. It will
invite contributions addressing immigrant protest
in everyday, local and wider national and global
contexts. It will particularly seek out
interdisciplinary work by scholars, activists,
and artists which offer accounts and analyses of
protests and protest materials, an arena that is
under-represented and under-explored in immigration and migration studies.
The rise in migration flows across the globe; the
condition of refugees, asylum seekers, economic
migrants, detainees with precarious status and
the “problems” occasioned by their presence in
various national contexts; policing measures
across the world that aim to control the incoming
strangers; and the increasing criminalization of
migrants are phenomena that have generated much
recent scholarship, especially in social
sciences. As many have argued, migrants have
become precarious symbols of globalization,
figures of intrusive otherness as well as key
characters in global struggles for freedom of
movement, human rights, and claims to the rights
of citizenship. Yet, not all migrants are equal.
Ruben Andersson, for example, reminds us that
“certain ‘migrants’ – the rich, the white, the
western Europeans – get their ‘migranthood’
erased...and ‘the migrant’ starts looking like a
brittle ideological construct in need of thorough
interrogation” (2009). Through a focus on
immigrant protest we hope to destablize the
sometimes hegemonic theoretical and popular
construction of `the migrant as other` and track
some of the contradictory and complex experiences
of migrancy, citizenship, belonging, and legality and illegality.
From the massive immigrant marches in the United
States in 2006 under the banner of A Day Without
Immigrants to various recent protests in Great
Britain, Australia, Canada, and Europe, immigrant
protests have gained global visibility,
underscoring the urgency of these
counter-hegemonic acts of dissent and
resistance. These protests are sometimes
inspirational but are as well politically and
ethically complex in terms of the forms of
solidarities and alliances that are possible (or
not) between citizens and non-citizens.
`Immigrant Protest’ will explore forms of social,
political and aesthetic engagements migrants and
immigrants who, in a variety of contexts and in a
diverse range of mediums, communicate immigrant
experience and in particular, but not
exclusively, the threat of state violence,
injustice, racialized and gendered oppression,
and the logic of exclusion and othering. We are
interested in essays which discuss political
engagements by refugees and non-status migrants
as well as less obvious instances of protest such
as political art or pedagogical practices.
Some of the “protest materials” we hope to see
discussed in this issue are: noborders networks
and camps, immigrant marches, riots and fires in
detention centers, solidarity “sleepouts” and
protest camps, and demonstrations at detention
facilities. We welcome essays that analyze
humanitarian campaigns, noborders protests and
camps, anti-deportation movements, underground
health and social services, charitable and legal
aid, religious networks and church based
resistance, immigrant journalism, guerrilla media
and video, internet blogs and online asylum
diaries, theater, cinema, performance, and
broadly understood art activism. The central
themes we hope this issue will raise and explore
include the phenomenology and corporeality of
immigrant protest, protest as a border-state,
protest as a claim of citizenship beyond the
State, questions of visibility and demands of
recognition raised through protest (and the
dangers of visibility in, for instance,
anti-deportation campaigns), citizenship and
political aesthetics, protesting identities and
subjective agency, `hidden protests’ within
immigration detention and other border zones,
protest and ethics and the some of the
psycho-social meanings and consequences of
protest. Alongside more spectacular or
`newsworthy` forms of protest, we hope to
encourage contributions which will explore
`everyday protest’, small and ordinary acts of
resistance which express the desire for a liveable life.
Please sumbit a 500-word abstract and a short bio
by August 15, 2009 to Katarzyna Marciniak
([log in to unmask]) and Imogen Tyler ([log in to unmask]).
Katarzyna Marciniak
Associate Professor
Transnational Studies
Department of English
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
Imogen Tyler
Lecturer and Sociology UG Admissions Tutor
Sociology Department
Lancaster University
LA1 4YD
01524 594186
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University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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