Monograph by Anastasia Tataryn
Law, Migration and Precarious Labour: Ecotechnics of the Social, 2021
Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal a... more Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal and political construction of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer, whilst at the same time reimagining this irregularity as the basis of an alternative, post-capitalist, sociality.
The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term ‘ecotechnics’, in order to examine how economic, political, and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality – and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world – is not insurmountable. The book’s consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only with migration and with labour itself, but ultimately with each other.
This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political, or policy interests in this area.
eBook ISBN9781315204673
ISBN 9781138700499
https://www.routledge.com/Law-Migration-and-Precarious-Labour-Ecotechnics-of-the-Social/Tataryn/p/book/9781138700499?utm_source=individuals&utm_medium=shared_link&utm_campaign=B009639_ca1_1au_1aj_d717_keytitleq4
Papers by Anastasia Tataryn
Law and Critique , 2021
Fitzpatrick's writing on international law did not constitute the main focus of his oeuvre. Howev... more Fitzpatrick's writing on international law did not constitute the main focus of his oeuvre. However, the determinate-responsive nature of law that characterised so much of his work did extend to an analysis of the generative force of international law. This article picks up on commentary from Modernism and the Grounds of Law (2001) and 'Latin Roots' (2010), among other contributions, to test this generative force of international law, which Fitzpatrick identifies as a necessary affirmation of the movement between the 'determinate but not ultimately determinate' sovereignty of a singular nation state and the 'illimitably responsive but not ultimately responsive' force of the community (Fitzpatrick 2010, p. 46). We test Fitzpatrick's view of international law through two examples of un-recognised states and the mechanism of non/recognition utilised by the international legal community to determine what constitutes a singular nation-state for participation in the community of international law. Our two case studies, North Cyprus and Crimea, illuminate the continuing relevance of Fitzpatrick's schema. Through non/recognition, 'states' that are includedas-excluded participate in the ongoing affirmation of an international legal 'community', a community that continues to be constituted through the affirmation of imperial power.
Comparative Law Review, 2020
Protectionist migration discourses and limited employment protection manifest a belief that commu... more Protectionist migration discourses and limited employment protection manifest a belief that community, nationhood
and citizenship need to be contained and maintained. This article considers firstly what is prohibiting, or obstructing,
openness to categories of migrants and work by focusing on the tenacity of the nation-state. Drawing on feminist
labour law and ecology scholarship, I then explore what exceeds being technologised into ‘nation’ or ‘community’ to
open onto an anarchic onto-epistemology, as creative presence. The article provides a glimpse into a larger project that explores thinking of the limits of law and legal categories, in particular labour migration in the United Kingdom (UK), as ecotechnical.
Law and Critique , 2018
Does, or should, social uprising lead to new legal form? Ukraine’s current situation following th... more Does, or should, social uprising lead to new legal form? Ukraine’s current situation following the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–2014, with continuing violent conflict in Donbas and Crimea, suggests that not only is it unclear how a ‘new’ form is assessed, but existing transitional policies and frameworks are unlikely to be clearly implemented and enforced. An alternative analysis of transformation is necessary to address the conflicting aftermath of uprising within a particular historical and cultural context. The transformation that is happening in Ukraine is a continuum that is intellectual and psychological as much as reforming judicial systems and governance. Thinking transformation differently opens onto narratives, complexity of causes and a plurality of ideas of future, resolutions and justice. Such a shift in thought and analysis, informed by narratives and grounded research, is necessary in order to try to understand the current pursuit of justice in Ukraine.
The terms “economic” and “irregular” migrant support a particular construction of the subject of ... more The terms “economic” and “irregular” migrant support a particular construction of the subject of labor law, whereby the exclusion of some from a formal employment relationship renders them necessary precarious laborers. The experience of precarious work is not an experience limited to migrant workers. However, the relationship between labor regulation and the most precarious of workers is one that has been gaining critical attention. Building on existing studies of migration, precarity and labor, I question the boundaries and frame of labor law with regard to precarious workers through Jean-Luc Nancy’s confronted community. Re-thinking the legal citizen-subject of labor law is necessary before remedies to address the exploitation of workers in precarious situations can be successful.
This article explores the phenomenon of migrant labour2 through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hos... more This article explores the phenomenon of migrant labour2 through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hospitality.
Law and Critique, Nov 2012
Reflecting on the Occupy movement, particularly Occupy Wall Street, this article begins by addres... more Reflecting on the Occupy movement, particularly Occupy Wall Street, this article begins by addressing two major questions: how are social movements understood by legal academics; and how do social movements engage with law? Our aim is to present an alternative frame to understanding law and social movements. We draw on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to explore law as both present and constituted in the coming together of persons in common which occurs in social movements. While the Occupy movement does engage with a form of law that is legislated and enacted through the government and legal system of a nation-state, the movement also forms and enacts law as part of its own processes. In this article we shift perspectives and attempt to think law within social movements. This involves a critical reading of some dominant approaches that explore social movements and law. Rather than situate our discussion within boundaries that seek to identify what is inside or outside a law and legal system that is determined and enforced by a nation-state (government and judicial system), our discussion of law involves a re-thinking of law. This law is part of a constant negotiation and it is involved in the dynamic processes of movements. Law involves establishing a limit and tracing this limit, but this limit is un-working itself as soon as it is constituted. The Occupy movements live law by existing not outside the law, but by rethinking the role and function of law in the movement and processes of community.
Scholars gain a deeper understand of identity and meaning in Stó:lō history by recognizing the r... more Scholars gain a deeper understand of identity and meaning in Stó:lō history by recognizing the role of ancestral names in Stó:lō society — at “contact” in the nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century. Currently, Stó:lō are reviving traditions of naming ceremonies and
carrying ancestral names. Ancestral names are critical to the existence of Stó:lō culture; they are the tangible manifestation of a Stó:lō person’s connection to ancestors, past and future. This paper explores the significance of ancestral names in Stó:lō tradition through conversations and interviews conducted in the
spring of 2005 with members of the Stó:lō Nation, transcripts of earlier interviews conducted with Stó:lō elders held in the Stó:lō Nation Archives, the ethnography of the Stó:lō, and more recent scholarly works. This analysis seeks to contextualize the role of ancestral names in Stó:lō society to reveal a deep,
multilayered, understanding of history.
http://knotpolitics.blogspot.co.uk
The criminalization of migration has increased dramatically in the twenty-first century. In Canad... more The criminalization of migration has increased dramatically in the twenty-first century. In Canada, migrants deemed “illegal” are those found not to fit into existing categories of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.1 This thesis examines persons without legal immigration status in relation to Canadian immigration law and policy, and conditions of migration that result in persons staying in Canada regardless of legal status.
To address persons without legal status, the government of Canada has demonstrated three policy options: removal, ignoring and regularization. Regularization programs remain in demand by immigration advocacy groups. This thesis considers whether regularization programs are sufficient. This analysis is carried out with attention to immigration law since 1960, current policies, and select qualitative interviews with persons without legal status. Subsequently, new approaches to immigration law and policy will be considered, as well as Canada’s national ethos as a nation receptive to immigrants and refugees.
Book Chapters by Anastasia Tataryn
Law, Labour and the Humanities: Contemporary European Perspectives, 2019
Examining the United Kingdom Supreme Court case of Hounga v Allen [2014] and Taiwo v Olaigbe and ... more Examining the United Kingdom Supreme Court case of Hounga v Allen [2014] and Taiwo v Olaigbe and Onu v Akwiwu [2016] , this chapter will explore the legal gaps that construct ‘irregular’ status for workers with precarious legal immigration status, and in precarious employment arrangements. These gaps, as the chapter will endeavour to argue, illustrate work happening that goes beyond formal legal categories in employment law and immigration. Formally, or conventionally, the aim of recognition and the goal of achieving legal subjectivity and status is conformity with a subject that is a liberal, individual and autonomous being. By digging into the underlying foundations of legal status, and the aspiration of legal subjectivity, what is unearthed is a groundlessness that fundamentally shifts perspective on, and analyses of, legal gaps that construct the ‘irregular migrant’.
In, Being Social: Ontology, Law, Politics (2015)
Daniel Matthews and Tara Mulqueen (Eds).
Framing the Subjects and Objects of Contemporary EU Law, 2017
with Dora Kostakopoulou.
The chapter explores the relationship between objects and conditioning ... more with Dora Kostakopoulou.
The chapter explores the relationship between objects and conditioning events, and the idea of an ingression of an object into an event. Taken from natural sciences, this idea can also be fruitfully applied to political life. The example of this is the transformation of a homo subjectus into a homo objectus through a conditioning event. This process is illustrated with a number of case studies that affected the citizenship and other statuses of people. The chapter discusses the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (‘Brexit’) as an example of such a conditioning event.
Keywords: Brexit, citizenship, irregularity, subject, object, conditioning event.
Book Reviews by Anastasia Tataryn
Law and Literature, 2020
The title and author names are listed on this sheet as they will be published, both on your paper... more The title and author names are listed on this sheet as they will be published, both on your paper and on the Table of Contents. Please review and ensure the information is correct and advise us if any changes need to be made. In addition, please review your paper as a whole for typographical and essential corrections. Your PDF proof has been enabled so that you can comment on the proof directly using Adobe Acrobat.
Legal Studies , 2020
In the foreword to The Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law Harry Arthurs states that not only... more In the foreword to The Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law Harry Arthurs states that not only is labour law’s post-war model no longer effective, but ‘subordination, injustice, and indignity are endemic in our society; and not confined to the employment context’.With this opening, Arthurs sets the stage for this ambitious volume. The Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law addresses the political philosophical foundations of this field in order to revisit debates about labour law’s aim, goal and purpose. This very topical, engaged and complex mandate characterises the book, edited
by Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester and Virginia Mantouvalou.
In the introduction, the editors set out the aim of the volume: to interrogate labour law’s underlying goal. They ask, is it to achieve equality or liberty? Social inclusion? The promotion of workers’ dignity? Questioning labour law’s purpose and aim seems to have become somewhat of a formulaic opening for labour law edited collections. However, many of these edited collections (published overwhelmingly by Oxford University Press) agree that the normative foundations of labour law and theories of justice within the ordinary rules of private law (ie the contractual employment relationship) offer inadequate justice for employment relations. An expanded scope of labour law, as this edition proffers by excavating its philosophical foundations through key values, thus suggests that labour law address within its distinct ambit freedom, autonomy, dignity, equality in terms of respect, democracy and social justice. These are themes that go beyond traditional labour law, which by and large is wedded to strong libertarian political philosophies. As a consequence of dominant libertarian ideas, current legislative priorities in labour law are guided towards individual contracts. The standard contractual model for employment law has moved focus away from an awareness that labour relations are based on an asymmetrical labour market relationship, whereby the employer (business) has more market power (ownership) than the employee (worker).
The Modern Law Review
Volume 79, Issue 1, pages 202–206, January 2016
Law, Culture and the Humanities, Jan 1, 2012
Theory & Event, Jan 1, 2012
ABSTRACT What does it mean to be Human? This is a question that has been asked for centuries but ... more ABSTRACT What does it mean to be Human? This is a question that has been asked for centuries but still makes us pause and wonder. Joanna Bourke’s historical investigation of this question demonstrates in enthralling detail that there is no definitive trait or lasting element that can be held up as constituting the human. Bourke explores personhood, the animal, pain, faces and physiognomy, carnivorism and consumption from the Haitian Revolution (1791) to the present. In order to deconstruct what means to be human, Bourke captivatingly draws on diverse sources: newspapers, advertisements, fictional characters such as Kafka’s Red Peter, Charlotte Bronte’s Heathcliffe, the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, late 18th and 19th century discussions of carnivorism and vegetarianism, literary portrayals of Haiti and fears of cannibalism, scientific ‘discoveries’ such as animal to human organ transplants (the example of the baby, Stephanie Fae who in 1984 was given a baboon’s heart, chapter 17), facial grafting, cosmetic surgery, sexuality and “rejuvenation”. Bourke’s discussion is accessible to a broad, non-specialist audience, and is not heavily laden with theory. However, she does refer to critical theorists to support her discussion, most consistently Derrida’s deconstruction of humanity and animality. This book would be of interest to persons researching themes, in an Anglo-American context, such as rights, colonialism, history of popular culture, and questioning the animal. Relevant sections or select chapters could be used as provocative additions to undergraduate and graduate course modules in history, law, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, gender studies and race studies. The scope of the book is ambitious and broad, yet this is its strength: Bourke tackles a subject that is loaded with theoretical and popular significance. Each chapter includes images, some gruesome and disturbing, that elicit emotional responses from the reader. The experience of seeing, reading and processing the material offered in the book itself proves the book’s main contention that the best answer to the question of what it means to be human is perhaps that there is no answer. To illustrate this, Bourke uses the analogy of ants crawling on the Möbius Strip – a “one-sided surface, with no insider or outside; no beginning or end; no single point of entry or exit” (9). The Möbius Strip is used to support the argument that biology and culture, including the definition of animal/human, have no definitive boundaries or limits. In twenty chapters, divided into six sections, Bourke explores the violence that has come from “humanity’s obsessive attempts to demarcate the territory of the human from that of the animal – to tie a knot in that Möbius strip in order to declare ‘here! Is the fully-human. There! Are the others …” (378). Bourke concludes that what is needed is “negative zoelogy”, the “injection of instability and indeterminacy into our discussions” (10) to the point that there is no known. Rather there is the, “unknowability of all animals, including human ones” (16). This unknowability, which Bourke believes is a fundamental tenant of historical research, is posited at the conclusion of the book as a hopeful, Derridean gesture towards embracing the rich complexity of being. Bourke’s Möbius Strip analogy is posited in contrast to perspectives that suggest minimising difference as a way to address the oppression wrought by the pursuit of limit and definition throughout history. The author introduces her explicitly Anglo-American investigation by discussing a letter to the editor written by an “Earnest Englishwoman” in 1872. In this letter the woman is asking, satirically, whether women can be granted the same rights as those given to animals. Playing with the question raised in this letter, Bourke shifts the framework of humanity from one of mankind, to women, where “the Earnest Englishwoman’s ‘women’ stands in for all sexes and genders” (2). Bourke suggests placing “the female gender as indicative of the status of humanity” (2) and thus intentionally disrupting the tradition of humanity as measured by the male norm. From this point of departure, the book investigates humanity going back a century before the Earnest Englishwoman, to the Haitian Revolution beginning in 1791, and forward a century to the 1990s and beyond. Bourke deconstructs the...
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Monograph by Anastasia Tataryn
The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term ‘ecotechnics’, in order to examine how economic, political, and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality – and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world – is not insurmountable. The book’s consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only with migration and with labour itself, but ultimately with each other.
This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political, or policy interests in this area.
eBook ISBN9781315204673
ISBN 9781138700499
https://www.routledge.com/Law-Migration-and-Precarious-Labour-Ecotechnics-of-the-Social/Tataryn/p/book/9781138700499?utm_source=individuals&utm_medium=shared_link&utm_campaign=B009639_ca1_1au_1aj_d717_keytitleq4
Papers by Anastasia Tataryn
and citizenship need to be contained and maintained. This article considers firstly what is prohibiting, or obstructing,
openness to categories of migrants and work by focusing on the tenacity of the nation-state. Drawing on feminist
labour law and ecology scholarship, I then explore what exceeds being technologised into ‘nation’ or ‘community’ to
open onto an anarchic onto-epistemology, as creative presence. The article provides a glimpse into a larger project that explores thinking of the limits of law and legal categories, in particular labour migration in the United Kingdom (UK), as ecotechnical.
carrying ancestral names. Ancestral names are critical to the existence of Stó:lō culture; they are the tangible manifestation of a Stó:lō person’s connection to ancestors, past and future. This paper explores the significance of ancestral names in Stó:lō tradition through conversations and interviews conducted in the
spring of 2005 with members of the Stó:lō Nation, transcripts of earlier interviews conducted with Stó:lō elders held in the Stó:lō Nation Archives, the ethnography of the Stó:lō, and more recent scholarly works. This analysis seeks to contextualize the role of ancestral names in Stó:lō society to reveal a deep,
multilayered, understanding of history.
To address persons without legal status, the government of Canada has demonstrated three policy options: removal, ignoring and regularization. Regularization programs remain in demand by immigration advocacy groups. This thesis considers whether regularization programs are sufficient. This analysis is carried out with attention to immigration law since 1960, current policies, and select qualitative interviews with persons without legal status. Subsequently, new approaches to immigration law and policy will be considered, as well as Canada’s national ethos as a nation receptive to immigrants and refugees.
Book Chapters by Anastasia Tataryn
The chapter explores the relationship between objects and conditioning events, and the idea of an ingression of an object into an event. Taken from natural sciences, this idea can also be fruitfully applied to political life. The example of this is the transformation of a homo subjectus into a homo objectus through a conditioning event. This process is illustrated with a number of case studies that affected the citizenship and other statuses of people. The chapter discusses the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (‘Brexit’) as an example of such a conditioning event.
Keywords: Brexit, citizenship, irregularity, subject, object, conditioning event.
Book Reviews by Anastasia Tataryn
by Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester and Virginia Mantouvalou.
In the introduction, the editors set out the aim of the volume: to interrogate labour law’s underlying goal. They ask, is it to achieve equality or liberty? Social inclusion? The promotion of workers’ dignity? Questioning labour law’s purpose and aim seems to have become somewhat of a formulaic opening for labour law edited collections. However, many of these edited collections (published overwhelmingly by Oxford University Press) agree that the normative foundations of labour law and theories of justice within the ordinary rules of private law (ie the contractual employment relationship) offer inadequate justice for employment relations. An expanded scope of labour law, as this edition proffers by excavating its philosophical foundations through key values, thus suggests that labour law address within its distinct ambit freedom, autonomy, dignity, equality in terms of respect, democracy and social justice. These are themes that go beyond traditional labour law, which by and large is wedded to strong libertarian political philosophies. As a consequence of dominant libertarian ideas, current legislative priorities in labour law are guided towards individual contracts. The standard contractual model for employment law has moved focus away from an awareness that labour relations are based on an asymmetrical labour market relationship, whereby the employer (business) has more market power (ownership) than the employee (worker).
The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term ‘ecotechnics’, in order to examine how economic, political, and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality – and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world – is not insurmountable. The book’s consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only with migration and with labour itself, but ultimately with each other.
This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political, or policy interests in this area.
eBook ISBN9781315204673
ISBN 9781138700499
https://www.routledge.com/Law-Migration-and-Precarious-Labour-Ecotechnics-of-the-Social/Tataryn/p/book/9781138700499?utm_source=individuals&utm_medium=shared_link&utm_campaign=B009639_ca1_1au_1aj_d717_keytitleq4
and citizenship need to be contained and maintained. This article considers firstly what is prohibiting, or obstructing,
openness to categories of migrants and work by focusing on the tenacity of the nation-state. Drawing on feminist
labour law and ecology scholarship, I then explore what exceeds being technologised into ‘nation’ or ‘community’ to
open onto an anarchic onto-epistemology, as creative presence. The article provides a glimpse into a larger project that explores thinking of the limits of law and legal categories, in particular labour migration in the United Kingdom (UK), as ecotechnical.
carrying ancestral names. Ancestral names are critical to the existence of Stó:lō culture; they are the tangible manifestation of a Stó:lō person’s connection to ancestors, past and future. This paper explores the significance of ancestral names in Stó:lō tradition through conversations and interviews conducted in the
spring of 2005 with members of the Stó:lō Nation, transcripts of earlier interviews conducted with Stó:lō elders held in the Stó:lō Nation Archives, the ethnography of the Stó:lō, and more recent scholarly works. This analysis seeks to contextualize the role of ancestral names in Stó:lō society to reveal a deep,
multilayered, understanding of history.
To address persons without legal status, the government of Canada has demonstrated three policy options: removal, ignoring and regularization. Regularization programs remain in demand by immigration advocacy groups. This thesis considers whether regularization programs are sufficient. This analysis is carried out with attention to immigration law since 1960, current policies, and select qualitative interviews with persons without legal status. Subsequently, new approaches to immigration law and policy will be considered, as well as Canada’s national ethos as a nation receptive to immigrants and refugees.
The chapter explores the relationship between objects and conditioning events, and the idea of an ingression of an object into an event. Taken from natural sciences, this idea can also be fruitfully applied to political life. The example of this is the transformation of a homo subjectus into a homo objectus through a conditioning event. This process is illustrated with a number of case studies that affected the citizenship and other statuses of people. The chapter discusses the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (‘Brexit’) as an example of such a conditioning event.
Keywords: Brexit, citizenship, irregularity, subject, object, conditioning event.
by Hugh Collins, Gillian Lester and Virginia Mantouvalou.
In the introduction, the editors set out the aim of the volume: to interrogate labour law’s underlying goal. They ask, is it to achieve equality or liberty? Social inclusion? The promotion of workers’ dignity? Questioning labour law’s purpose and aim seems to have become somewhat of a formulaic opening for labour law edited collections. However, many of these edited collections (published overwhelmingly by Oxford University Press) agree that the normative foundations of labour law and theories of justice within the ordinary rules of private law (ie the contractual employment relationship) offer inadequate justice for employment relations. An expanded scope of labour law, as this edition proffers by excavating its philosophical foundations through key values, thus suggests that labour law address within its distinct ambit freedom, autonomy, dignity, equality in terms of respect, democracy and social justice. These are themes that go beyond traditional labour law, which by and large is wedded to strong libertarian political philosophies. As a consequence of dominant libertarian ideas, current legislative priorities in labour law are guided towards individual contracts. The standard contractual model for employment law has moved focus away from an awareness that labour relations are based on an asymmetrical labour market relationship, whereby the employer (business) has more market power (ownership) than the employee (worker).
In the twenty years that this school as been in existence it has become known as a hub for creative and provocative critical legal research. The fact of many of us being here is a testament to something that was started here, and the past 20 years have been built on a spirit that attracts a constant yearning for questioning, for pushing boundaries, and for standing against the grain.
Many of us post-graduate students have come here for a reason – it’s a bit mad, if you think about it, to be doing a PhD in law in the first place, never mind at a place where we invite art, cultural critique, protest, literature, philosophy, friendship, and resistance to the mix of legal questioning and ideas! Yet it is this richness and potential that is the reason we were drawn to Post-Grad studies at BBK. This is a place that supports a group of people who engage in their work with fearlessness and fierceness that is not found in most places, especially academia.
The School has created for itself in the past 20 years a space for difference, that here and now must be actively maintained as an honesty, an openness, where we can challenge each other and generously offer up our ideas, our research and our motivations for being here. Given the pressures to higher education and the very real market-oriented managerial models that threaten research that is outside of the ‘box’, now must be the time to think institutions differently. This is not to deny our contextual limits, but to use our intellectual work and our coming together here and now to assert alternative potentials within the systems that we are confined by.
The invitation to creativity, to probe possibilities, and to question each other as much as possible is what this School offers; it’s what this School is about. This ethos may be uncomfortable, but this is what will carry this school and PG research for many years to come.
It is our hope, as current doctoral students that we can reflect on the 20 years of this School and all work to maintain its radicality and independence. That it can continue to be a place open to research that does not necessarily ‘contribute to the market’, in the Age of Austerity and the marketisation of knowledge. That we can tap into the spirit that brought us to this place in the first place to fight – not only out on the streets, but here, here at home. To fight the fragmentation that threatens us not only on a macro level, but manifests itself in the interpersonal, (petty) politics that threaten the potential to maintain what 20 years here have built.
This is not an ideal that we speak of, but an imperative to creatively come together within the conditions of possibility and impossibility that we work within.
As Post-Graduate representatives coming from Africa, Latin America and North America, we are proud that the School continues to embrace and invite diverse theorists and scholars from Mbembe to Zizek, Malabou to Gordon, de Sousa Santos to Cornell. We must ensure this continues and that our words, our work, our discussions may inform our resistance.
Building on the critical scholarship in International Relations, Human Geography, Political Theory and International Law, this paper turns to theatre as a site for the critical (de)construction of borders. It considers whether contemporary critiques of the border in these disciplines are transferrable towards the presumed “alternative” realm of theatre. With its disciplinary hybridity captured by the constellation of intellectual, physical and creative energy, theatre has the potential to delve into the nexus of differences, existing at the site of normative transgression rather than comfortably surrounded by an intellectual border. This is a refreshing and rich alternative to discipline-bound discussions of the border. However, the European project itself is not limitless, and recent political and legal changes stifle reception to linguistic, religious and cultural “difference”. Using theatre as a methodology for the relational (de)construction of the border, this paper reflects on the normative requirements of ideologically-guided border construction in academic work. Vacillating between the collective and the particular, this paper reflects on the implications of aspiring to a post-national European theatre. We argue that in its character as both unavoidable and constantly transgressed, the border provides the space in which to negotiate the normative foundations of artistic production, but one that needs constant attention and constant deconstruction.
My paper has two sections: I will first briefly discuss why hospitality is relevant in the context of irregular migrant labourers. Secondly, I will outline how Derrida’s hospitality invites the question of home, while at the same time ripping the welcome mat out from under our feet. At this irreconcilable threshold between hostility and welcome, hospitality can be conceptualised as nothing but inoperative.
cosmopolitanism in many “Global Cities” that are increasingly migrant-dependent in
low-waged labour sectors. Many researchers have described migrant labourers as the
underbelly of the city, the labourers that keep the city afloat especially in times of economic
austerity but whose employment is often contingent on their forfeiting enforceable rights
and legal recourse. My question in this paper is two-fold: Firstly, how does one carry
out legal research on a population that is defined by the law (“undocumented” “sans
papier” “irregular migrant worker”) but exists in the shadow of the law? Secondly, how does
one methodologically build on critical international legal theory to address real contemporary
issues of international identities that are not recognized in domestic law? I explore these
questions wondering about “alternative” research methodologies, such as the work of John
Borrows, as an approach to critical (legal) research. Such alternatives suggest stretching
(radicalizing) research paradigms in order to re-imagine experiences of migration, labour
and law – both as singular events and plural collective experiences – through considering
presuppositions of community and law at the level of our own research. I use the case of
irregular, precarious migrant labourers to consider how we may question those who are in
the shadow of official state law and re-imagine their international presence. This suggests
different points of reference, such as learning from Indigenous Research Methodologies as
methodology, rather than limited to a specific subject of research.
Course in Public Comparative Constitutional Law at the Università di Catania, Italy. This lecture reflects on the primacy of citizenship and sovereignty as a foundational tenant of constitutions in the modern international legal order. The presence and labour participation of undocumented, illegalised, migrants illuminates the failure of modern law and the limit of citizenship-recognition in constitutions. Eco-technics is explored to bring to light the limited framework of modern law, and the possibility of alternatives.