A Case for Court Watch: Feminist Geopolitical Method for Immigration Research

Keywords: legal geography, feminist geopolitics, court watch, immigration
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

For decades, “court watch” programs have served as community tools for ensuring due process and accountability in judicial proceedings. Originally used in domestic violence or custody cases, the court watch model more recently has been applied in oversight of immigration hearings, bringing into focus the “everyday” geopolitical practices that produce territorial borders elsewhere. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork developing an immigration court watch program in Houston, TX to explore its potential as a feminist geopolitical method for research - a component of “courtroom ethnography” with an explicitly collaborative, pedagogic and activist orientation. This research contributes to recent legal geographic scholarship on embodiment and materiality in court space, and demonstrates how in the case of immigration administration, court watch can serve as a point of public intervention in border-making processes that are otherwise out of sight or at a distance.