Legal/illegal: protesting citizenship in Fortress America

Marciniak, Katarzyna

doi:10.1080/13621025.2013.780754

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Moreover, the Right to Live protest sought to actively transform and mediate the affects commonly attached to the figures of 'asylum seeker' and 'refugee' that are negatively loaded and signal strangeness in the Finnish public sphere. This is similar to the strategies humanitarian organisations use to support immigrants by altering the stigmatised and xenophobic public figure of the immigrant (Marciniak, 2013). In the Right to Live protest this was done through various practices.…”

Section: Affective Labour and Ambivalencementioning

confidence: 80%

The affective infrastructure of a protest camp: Asylum seekers’ ‘Right to Live’ movement

Näre

Jokela

2022

The Sociological Review

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In this article, we develop the concept of affective infrastructure as the entanglement of affects, meanings and materiality to analyse protest camps as a specific organisational form of social and political movement. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects investigating an asylum seekers’ protest camp in Helsinki, Finland, we argue that affects can be understood as having an infrastructural quality. The article contributes to research on affective politics by empirically studying the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. We distinguish between three interrelated dimensions of the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. First, affects are mobilised to mediate place-related meanings, the alteration of which is crucial to all protest camps. Second, affects are involved in creating the social space and atmosphere necessary to sustain a long-lasting protest. Third, affects impress themselves on abstract objects and ideas that must be managed as a part of the protest’s political message. Affects not only join subjects and objects together but also divide them, illustrating that an infrastructure becomes visible when it staggers or fails.

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Section: Affective Labour and Ambivalencementioning

confidence: 80%

The affective infrastructure of a protest camp: Asylum seekers’ ‘Right to Live’ movement

Näre

Jokela

2022

The Sociological Review

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“…Immigrant communities have actively resisted aggressive enforcement programs such as 287(g), Arizona’s SB 1070, and the 2006 Sensenbrenner Bill, all of which make immigration enforcement a part of everyday policing (Boyce et al 2017; Gonzales 2014; Strunk and Leitner 2013; Voss and Bloemraad 2011). 4 Immigrants have used direct action such as public demonstrations, marches, and sit‐ins to demand legislative or executive action on immigration reform (Ataç et al 2016; Marciniak 2013; Morales 2018; Tyler and Marciniak 2013). Dream activists successfully pushed the Obama administration to create protections for immigrants without lawful status who came to the US as children (Gonzales 2008; Nicholls 2013; Nicholls and Fiorito 2015; Unzueta Carrasco and Seif 2014).…”

Section: The Strategy and Politics Of Deportation Defense Campaignsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is precisely this characteristic of DDCs which provides us a unique opportunity to explore what the editors to this special issue identify as a tension between conforming to the disciplinary apparatus of citizenship (Inda 2008; Marciniak 2013; Ong 2006) and disrupting these regimes through more transgressive tactics (Campesi 2015; Gill et al 2014; Rygiel 2016). On the one hand, reframing conceptions of citizenship beyond white, straight, and heteronormative and enacting these forms of citizenship through everyday practices may disrupt traditional conceptions of citizenship (Luibhéid and Cantu 2005; Turner 2016) and enact new insurgent forms of citizenship (Leitner and Strunk 2014).…”

Section: The Strategy and Politics Of Deportation Defense Campaignsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns

Kocher

Stuesse

2020

Antipode

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Undocumented activism is on the rise. In response to the expansion of immigrant policing, detention, and deportation, immigrant rights organizers have increasingly deployed a longstanding approach to anti‐deportation activism called “deportation defense campaigns” (DDCs). DDCs seek to disrupt the deportation regime by preventing or delaying individual deportations and providing immigrants a path to temporary or permanent legalization on a case‐by‐case basis. Yet in the process, campaigns must address questions about when and how to challenge dominant discourses and institutions while also achieving short‐term goals. We examine DDCs through Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “minor” to examine how campaigns navigate difficult decisions about when and how to employ tactics that are typically characterized as either disruptive or conformist. Indeed, we argue that disruption and conformism should be understood not as a static evaluative framework, but as strategies that condition, and are conditioned by, the contexts in which undocumented activism unfolds. Using ethnographic methods, we examine two DDCs to show how the campaigns strategically navigated the cramped political spaces of undocumented organizing in the months following the new Trump administration’s surge of anti‐immigrant policies. We find that DDCs simultaneously draw upon and subvert dominant forms of citizenship and belonging in order to pressure ICE to exercise legal discretion and stop deportation. We conclude that DDCs unfold under historically and geographically specific conditions that not only shape what counts as disruptive and conformist, but may call into question any easy division between the two altogether.

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“…Alvaro’s friendship and presence in the various scenes in which he is involved is conveyed as affectively important, enhancing the capacities of all those who encounter him. While such depictions powerfully articulate the affinities between those who are involved in creating alternative worlds, they also carry the potential to destabilize what Katarzyna Marciniak (2013: 262) has called ‘the persistent imagining of “illegal aliens” as nonwhite, dangerous, and poor.’ Yet, when directed as a plea to the state such narratives also risk reproducing the binary between deserving and undeserving migrants. The quite explicit tactic of these testimonial excerpts is to depict a hard-working, energetic community builder whose efforts augment forms of self-sufficiency amongst marginalized subjects (migrants, queers, youth).…”

Section: ‘Let Alvaro Stay’ (Toronto 2011)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since the mass demonstrations of undocumented migrants on 1 May 2006 in cities across the USA and beyond under the banner of ‘A Day Without Immigrants,’ a number of commentators have explored the promise of migrant mobilizations for a profound rethinking of the politics of rights and recognition in relation to logics of citizenship and borders (e.g. De Genova and Borcila, 2011; Marciniak, 2013; Nyers, 2010). To my mind, one of the most provocative analyses of the upsurge in migrant mobilizations that burst into view that day is Nicolas De Genova’s (2010) assertion that ‘A Day Without Immigrants’ advanced a decidedly queer politics that went beyond the twin logics of rights and representation to challenge the very legitimacy of the nation-state and its immigration and border security regimes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting the undocumented: Toward a queer politics of no borders

White

2014

Sexualities

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This article explores the challenges of developing queer migrant justice strategies within nation-state contexts. With a focus on the Toronto-based ‘Let Alvaro Stay’ campaign (2011) and Julio Salgado’s collaborative ‘I Am Undocuqueer’ project, I critically examine queer anti-deportation activists’ reliance on methodological nationalisms and visibility politics in making claims hearable to the state. While such tactics risk reinforcing the nation-state as a primary site of identification, thereby contributing to its naturalization as an inevitable horizon of belonging, I argue that they also open space for imagining queer(er) no borders futures.

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Legal/illegal: protesting citizenship in Fortress America

Cited by 10 publications

References 13 publications

The affective infrastructure of a protest camp: Asylum seekers’ ‘Right to Live’ movement

The affective infrastructure of a protest camp: Asylum seekers’ ‘Right to Live’ movement

Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns

Documenting the undocumented: Toward a queer politics of no borders

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