Imaginary Pathologies of Contagion and Crisis Politics at the Border

In this presentation Claudia Tazreiter considers the global context of irregular migration, focusing on temporary migrant workers and asylum seekers who in many jurisdictions are labeled ‘illegal’ and are the cause of anxieties and crises in receiving societies. The presentation draws on interviews conducted with asylum seekers and irregular migrants in the Asia Pacific region.  Immanuel Ness will moderate discussion after the presentation.

Please join us on Tuesday November 25
6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Room 9205
Graduate Center, CUNY

lifeboat

The presentation will focus on the concept of crisis and its deployment in forms of governmentality and in the biopolitics of everyday life where heterotopias as ‘non-places’ of suspended life area apparent in form such as detention camps, off-shore processing and interdiction on the high seas, applied to manage perceived crises in irregular migration. Diagnoses of twenty first century anxieties and pathologies point to multiple and often overlapping orders and disorders that evoke various crisis narratives that will be explored. The presentation considers whether crisis is a warranted narrative in the context of irregular migrant arrivals; what its consequences are; and explores alternatives such as a ‘politics of becoming’. As a case study, the externalization of borders in the case of the Australian state’s treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat as an example of deployment crisis narrative will be explored.

Claudia Tazreiter (PhD, Sociology, University of New South Wales) is senior lecturer in sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW, Australia. Her research focuses on forced and irregular migration, human rights and social change and gendered forms of violence. She is the author of Asylum Seekers and the State. The Politics of Protection in a Security-Conscious World (Ashgate, 2004, 2006), Fluid Security in the Asia Pacific. Mobility, National Security and Human Rights (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) with Sharon Pickering, Leanne Weber, Marie Segrave and Helen McKernan, and co-editor of Globalisation and Social Transformation in Two Culturally Diverse Societies: The Australian and Malaysian Experience (Palgrave 2013) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently managing editor of The Australian Journal of Human Rights and is an associate of the Australian Human Rights Centre.

Immanuel Ness teaches political science at Brooklyn College CUNY and is author of numerous books on migrant labor and workers movements.

 

This event is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics
It is open and free to the public.

 

 

 

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