Call for Papers

Citizenship Studies Special Issue: IMMIGRANT PROTEST

Guest co-editors: Katarzyna Marciniak (Ohio University, USA) and Imogen Tyler (Lancaster University, UK)

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 [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]

Katarzyna Marciniak
Associate Professor
Transnational Studies
Department of English
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

Imogen Tyler
Sociology Department
Lancaster University
LA1 4YD