[URBANTH-L]CFP: Citizenship Studies Special Issue: Immigrant Protest

[Angela Jancius]

*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 marcinia[at]ohiou.edu and i.tyler[at]lancaster.ac.uk.

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

Imogen Tyler
Sociology Department
Lancaster University
LA1 4YD