Human rights, migration and undocumentedness

We are back! Last week we had a workshop in Copenhagen at the conference Nordic Migration Research, with five interesting presentation on The Everyday Politics of Undocumented Migrants (abstracts are published on website).This week I am visiting Madrid where the IMISCOE-conference is taking place. This year it covers the theme “Immigration, Social Cohesion and Social Innovation”. Together with my colleague Erica Righard I put together the workshop ARTS BASED MIGRATION INQUIRIES. Connections between arts and social sciences in practice and research. Starting point for the workshop was that migration in all its complexity should be studied from multiple perspectives and with varied approaches. We wanted to explore migration beyond the traditional boundaries of social science by integrating arts practice as a base for analysis of migration. Rolling (2010) has stated that “Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher’s practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the sciences cannot go”. Against this background, it is relevant to explore what we can learn about migration from arts-based research. Persefoni Myrtou in her presentation talked about a larger project in different European countries “Migrating Art Academies” which aims at transferring art and scientific knowledge production outside the academia. That way hierarchical structures among players and roles may be re-defined. I myself had a presentation about the No Border Musical in Malmö, drawing on Rancière’s notions of politics and police (paper was written in collaboration with Emma Söderman); and a third presentation concerned irregularity in the US. Carl Bagley talked inspiring about combining arts-based practice (performance, installation, photo, poetry, etc.) with social science analytical perspectives and methodologies (ethnography, visual sociology, etc.). Together with Ricardo Castro-Salazae, he published a book on this, using a Critical Race Theory approach. To conclude the panel included stimulating dialogues about arts-based research within the field of migration.

As I prepare for my fieldwork in Birmingham this winter I am starting to come across some of the great organisations that work for the rights of the “rightsless” in Birmingham. One of them is ASIRT – Asylum Support and Immigration Resource team, who supply legal advice and advocacy support to migrants who have been subject to migration control. On their blog they tell some horrifying stories about the effects of the hostile environment in the UK for undocumented migrants that is growing even more hostile with the new Immigration Bill. In a recent blog post they reflect on a specific case where a woman is being treated by local authorities in a Kafkaesque manner, and how ASIRT managed to protect her rights by threatening the local government with Juridicial Review.

http://asirt.org.uk/wordpress/?p=241

During my stay in Birmingham, where I will be a guest PhD at IRiS – Institute for Research into Superdiversity at Birmingham University, I will post regular updates about what is happening in the UK and Birmingham on the issue of irregular migration.

/Jacob Lind

During our Brown-bag seminar last week we discussed how to involve refugees in migration-research and, linked to this, what it means to be an activist researcher. The latter is discussed by Charles R. Hale (ed.) in Engaging Contradictions. Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (2008). With different approaches the tension that many migration researchers find themselves in, between demands for rigor and objectivity on the one hand and direct engagement in social activism on the other, is discussed.

A central question to the authors in the book is how anthropology, the discipline in which many of them are trained, can be part of the creation of activist scholarship. Nearly all of the authors remind us that the discipline’s methods of collecting and measuring data were born through colonial relations of domination. Contemporary manifestations of anthropology often work in the service of governments, NGOs, and multinational corporations to destabilize communities. Editor Charles R. Hale’s advice is that activists should follow the methodological directives of their disciplines to prove scholarly rigor. This however is questioned in the afterword by Joy James and Edmund T. Gordon who stress the importance of physical and intellectual exits from the academy: “We have little control over the meanings given to our appearances or our words within the academy; we have agency only over our departure from the academic staging of our radicalisms” (page 372).

In the book Doing research with refugees. Issues and Guidelines, Bogusia Temple, Rhetta Moran and others discuss more practically what a participatory approach within migration research can be. Jointly developed between academics, voluntary organisations, service providers and refugee communities, the book aims to open up debate on research with refugees, to expand what is counted as evidence in future research, and to foster the inclusion of perspectives of people whose experience it is, that is, refugees themselves. The reason for initiating the book was an increased intolerance of refugees in the UK and the issue of poverty as the prevailing context for the asylum seeker community. Furthermore in the research community there had been a growing feeling of the lack of resourced space and time to share and develop a more coherent understanding about the intersections between their research and development activities and the constantly changing policy landscape.

The authors use the terms ‘refugee’ or ‘refugee people seeking asylum’ in their broadest senses to make the point that, irrespective of where individual people may be in relation to their claims for asylum, they are all seeking refuge from persecution and, like everyone else, they have many other roles: they are mothers, sisters, fathers and brothers. We are not interested in how many people the government feels should be allowed to stay in the UK or in the different labels it uses to categorise people as deserving or otherwise.

In the editors’ introduction they explain their points of departure, which isn’t to present a literature review of current research with refugees. Readers looking for this may instead read Castles et al (2002), and the website of the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (www.icar.org.uk). The aim of the guidelines are instead

–       to reflect the importance of moving beyond the unproblematic use of language. It’s recognised that words and concepts have different meanings in different languages and that the languages used in research may affect findings.

–       to describe the variety of ways in which refugees can be involved in research, pragmatically in that they recognise that issues of funding and time restraints are important influences on research, whatever the intention of the researchers.

–       to show an understanding of the importance of ethical considerations.

Further, benefits of participatory approaches are presented as something maximising local participation so that proposed projects better fit the needs of local people. In connection to this a reference is made to literature showing that people who speak little or no English do not access services because they see them as inappropriate (Robinson, 2002). Participatory approaches furthermore force researchers to employ rigorous processes of checking interpretation and exposing their own perspectives; They can, ideally, lead to a sense of ownership, responsibility and self-esteem; They recognise that people have skills and capacities rather than seeing sections of society as permanently needy; and they can release community development capacities. Some disadvantages of participatory approaches are that they are highly resource and labour intensive; that participation tends to stay at the practice level, leaving academics and service deliverers to reassert their expertise at the policy level. Furthermore, they are sometimes seen as not real science and are therefore dismissed. These disadvantages of participation are related to concerns with qualitative research generally. The disadvantages surrounding traditional, completely researcher-led agendas using quantitative 
methods are less often spelt out. Communities are often seen as undifferentiated wholes and little 
time is given to engaging with different sections within communities. Sometimes only formal community organisations are approached 
and issues of accountability and representations are often not 
addressed. Users rarely have the resources, insider knowledge of the system or 
language used by service providers and academics to engage on an equal footing.

I think the books lend themselves well to a discussion of the role of migration researchers in society. Working on highly politicised issues we  need to think about why we do research and how our research can be used. What it should mean to involve refugees in research isn’t discussed in depth in the books but several contributions may be used as illustrations of how this can be done and as a point of departure when reflecting on methodological considerations.

Workshop for SWEPSA 2014

The Boundaries of Citizenship – Naturalization, Integration, Membership

Christian Fernández, Malmö University

 

In recent years a growing number of European countries have introduced language and civics tests as well as other naturalization criteria for immigrants who wish to become citizens. Sweden is actually one of the few European countries that as of today have not implemented any such admission criteria – although a very light version is proposed in the citizenship committee report (SOU 2013: 29). The reasons for implementing naturalization criteria come in slightly different shapes, although they normally stress the importance of citizenship as a sign of full inclusion in society and of facilitating integration by making the implicit (liberal-democratic) norms and values of society explicit. The spreading use of naturalization criteria are controversial, however, and have been widely debated. Is the real intention to facilitate integration or to exclude migrants from political membership? Are they democratically justifiable? If so, what should they cover and how should they be carried out? And, not the least, what effects do such tests really have – on the rate of applications for citizenship, on patterns of migration and on integration? With respect to such questions, the overarching aim of the workshop is to explore citizenship as a boundary drawing and polity (re)producing instrument. Scholars of all backgrounds with an interest in citizenship, naturalization and integration are warmly invited to submit papers, be they empirical or theoretical, comparative or single case studies, descriptive or normative. Contact Christian Fernández. Associate Professor in Political Science. christian.fernandez@mah.se

Call for papers

Arts-based migration research, emerging connections between arts and social sciences

 Convenors: Anna Lundberg, Malmö University & Erica Righard, Malmö University. It is not controversial to argue that migration in all its complexity should be studied from multiple perspectives and with varied approaches. In this research panel we aim at exploring migration beyond the traditional boundaries of social science by integrating arts practice as a base for analysis of migration. “Arts-based research methodologies are characteristically emergent, imagined, and derivative from an artist/researcher’s practice or arts praxis inquiry models; they are capable of yielding outcomes taking researchers in directions the sciences cannot go” (Rolling 2010). Against this background, it is relevant to explore what we can learn about migration from arts-based research. We invite presentations about migration that combine arts-based practice (performance, installation, photo, poetry, etc.) with social science analytical perspectives and methodologies (ethnography, visual sociology, etc.). Hence, the panel aims to enhance new knowledge about migration and stimulating dialogues about arts-based research within the field of migration. Migration is here understood in a broad sense. It can, for instance, refer to international and internal migration, diversity and ethnic relations, as well as responses to and experiences of migration and diversity. We welcome contributions with a theoretical focus, as well as more practice-based presentations.  This invitation is rather open and might include, but is not limited to, discussions on arts-based methodologies in migration studies, arts-based empirical analysis of migration, and the role of art in social research and in migration. The accepted papers will be put together into coherent research panels consisting of four to five paper presentations each. A discussant will be appointed to each paper presentation. To propose a paper for this research panel, please send title and an abstract (250 words) of your presenation together with your name, title and institutional affiliation to Anna Lundberg (anna.lundberg@mah.se) and Erica Righard (erica.righard@mah.se) no later than 30 March 2014.

Accepted participants will be notified by mid-May 2014.

Full papers will have to be uploaded to the conference online system no later than 1 August 2014.

Welcome to our workshop The Everyday Politics of Undocumented Migrants in Copenhagen August 13-15.

Undocumented migrants are frequently treated as either a security issue that has to be managed, or a passive group requiring protection. Problematising this dichotomy, the workshop seeks to explore what political agency individuals grouped within the category of ‘undocumented migrants’ themselves possess. The workshop invites research that focuses on the everyday experiences and agency of undocumented migrants, with particular emphasis on the city-level, and how individuals may express and construct ‘belongness’ to a community despite lacking formal citizenship status.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s observation that rights can be realised only in a political community and Jacque Rancière’s theory that politics of human rights must be rooted in the practices of rights-holders the workshop asks how undocumented migrants themselves claim and utilize rights. Part of this agency includes how individuals navigate between multiple levels of regulation, which in the case of this workshop means the interaction between the city and other levels including national and international regulations impacting undocumented migrants.

Papers with either a theoretical approach or empirically oriented texts, about 20 pgs, are welcome (deadline will be by the end of June). Please send abstract (300 words) no later than March 15, to nordicmigration-conf@sfi.dk

Also see general guidelines for the 17th Nordic Migration Research Conference: http://www.sfi.dk/17th_nordic_migration_conference-12235.aspx

 

UMP Brown bag seminars

 

In the project “Undocumented children’s rights claims. A multidisciplinary project on agency and contradictions between different levels of regulations and practice that reveals undocumented children’s human rights” we investigate everyday life and rights-claiming among undocumented youth (read more below).

These are our seminars during the spring of 2014. We talk English and the seminars take place at Malmö University, in the conference room on third floor, Gäddan (room 355) 12-15 (bring your own lunch). If you would like to present your own work, or any of the texts listed in the schedule, please contact anna.lundberg@mah.se.

Most welcome!

 

1. January 30 Agamben

Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights. Statelessness, Images, Violence, by John Lechte, Saul Newman (2013).

Presenters: Anna Lundberg and Michael Strange.

 

2. February 13 Citizenship

‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship’ [and other relevant parts of this book] in Isin, E.F. and Nielsen, G.M. (eds), Acts of Citizenship (2008).

Contesting Citizenship, by Anne McNevin (2011).

Presenters: Emma Söderman and Mikael Spång.

 

3. March 6 Law

‘A-legality: Postnationalism and the Question of Legal Boundaries’, by Hans Lindahl, The Modern Law Review 73 (2010) 1, pp. 30-56

’Why Human Rights Fail to Protect Undocumented Migrants’, by Gregor Noll, European Journal of Migration and Law 12 (2010): 241-272.

’Towards a ‘Soft Law’ Framework for the Protection of Vulnerable Irregular Migrants’, by Alexander Betts

Int J Refugee Law (2010) 22 (2): 209-236

Presenters: Anna Lundberg.

 

4. March 20 Everyday Life

Life and Words. By Veena Das (2006).

Everyday Politics of the World Economy, by John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke (2007).

Migrant ”Illegality and Deportability in Everyday Life” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 31: 419-447 (Volume publication date October 2002).

Presenters: Jacob Lind, Michael Strange and Emma Söderman.

 

5. April 10 Anthropology (Note that we’ll meet 9-12 this time!)

’The specific intellectual’s pivotal position: action, compassion and thinking in administrative society, an Arendtian view’ by Gregory Feldman (School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver), Social Anthropology (2013) 21.

Presenters: Jacob Lind.

 

6. April 17 Participatory Research

’Doing Research with Refugees’. Issues and guidelines
Edited by Bogusia Temple and Rhetta Moran.

Presenters: Jacob Lind and Anna Lundberg.

 

7. May 8 Presentation of PhD projects <please contact Anna Lundberg if you want to make a presentation>.

 

8. June 5 Arendt

The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt.

’Beyond the ethics of admission: Stateless people, refugee camps and moral obligations’, by 
Serena Parekh, Philosophy Social Criticism, published online 28 August 2013.

Presenters: Mikael Spång and Emma Söderman.