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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