Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Audrey Lumley-Sapanski, Rights Lab, University of Nottingham

; ,

Description:

Critical geographic scholarship on ‘spatial strategies of exclusion’ has demonstrated the ways in which states exclude refugees and asylum seekers through ‘stretching and manipulating’ jurisdictional boundaries (Yea 2021) preventing refugees from seeking protection or moving autonomously. In addition to external bordering, detention, hotspots, and closed reception centers (Conlon, Hiemstra, and Mountz 2017) which physically prevent refugees from accessing and claiming status, refugees are kept from accessing support services or participating in political or civil processes in the post reception context which would enable their ‘full participation’ (Burridge et al 2017; Tazzioli 2018). Bordering is used as a state tactic of exclusion to deny full protection to particular bodies along racialised and gendered markers (Hobbs 2021). This work demonstrates the ways in which states deploy ‘strategies of exclusion’ ‘evad[ing] the provisions of international covenants (Mountz and Hiemstra 2012, 456) and increase insecurity.

Yea (2021) has recently called for the expansion of this lens to other persons of concern--specifically survivors of trafficking. This CFP considers the ways in which the critical migration lens—broadly focusing on exclusionary practices--is currently being engaged by scholars to understand migration governance or internally, 'out of place' bodies. We are especially interested in papers which a) seek to understand how states and other actors use legislation and spatialized processes to prevent people from accessing protection in source, transit and destination countries, b) to limit their identification and c) to spatially or legally differentiate them.
How does migration governance limit access to protection?
How are refugees and displaced populations made more at risk to human trafficking by humanitarian protection regimes?
In what ways beyond jurisdictional boundaries do states work to exclude people?
In what ways does the human trafficking regime’s arbitrariness (in terms of legal parameters, or enforcement) impact identification and vulnerability of survivors?
How is migration governance racialized or gendered in ways which exclude particular individuals or groups from seeking or gaining protection?
How do identification processes (e.g. national referral mechanisms) shape victim recognition in ways which preclude the identification of particular individuals or groups?
How have neoliberal economic arrangements delimited the resources available for support with impacts to insecurity at the corporeal scale?

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda