Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over hu... more Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governan...
Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policie... more Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policies, or designations like “immigrant” or “refugee.” Where there is no formal protection or legal status, people seek, forge, and find safe haven in other ways, by other means, and by necessity. In this article, I argue that U.S. war resisters to Canada forged safe haven through broadly based social movements. I develop this argument through examination of U.S. war-resister histories, focusing on two generations: U.S. citizens who came during the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam and, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Resisters and activists forged refuge through alternative paths to protection, including the creation of shelter, the pursuit of time-space trajectories that carried people away from war and militarism, the formation of social movements across the Canada-U.S. border, and legal challenges to state policies and practices.
The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet t... more The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet there has been no systematic account of its construction. Boats, Borders, and Bases traces the rise of detention through Cold War efforts to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants from arriving in the United States by boat. Caribbean migration and deterrence efforts are related to much-better-known policies that have shaped the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This account situates both the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico boundary within maritime and territorial grounds of U.S. empire. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account brings together histories of refugee resettlement, asylum, and criminalization to explore the racialization and interrelations in these policies. The turn to criminalize migration in the 1980s built upon both domestic crime politics and efforts to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers. The location of detention facilities in relatively remote places is not determined by formal ...
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neolib... more The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effect...
In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on insti... more In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the m...
As I planned and conducted a research project on the geopolitical consequences of contemporary US... more As I planned and conducted a research project on the geopolitical consequences of contemporary US migrant detention and deportation policies, I realized that the project would not fit neatly within any definition of “the political” that did not simultaneously ...
Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the proble... more Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the problematic political relationship between states and refugees highlighted b yHannah Arendt, shifting geopolitical, legal, and sovereign geographies have exacerbated the unevenness of refugees’ ability to claim the right to seek asylum. In this article, we employ a framework of embodied epistemologies to extend Arendt’s insights into the role of the stateless for sovereign logics. We argue that the ‘right to have rights’ as an embodied possibility is not only integral to the logics of sovereignty, but also to the creation of new political spaces. Our article draws on collaborative case studies in Guam/ Northern Marianas Islands, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. We argue that while Arendt paid singular attention to the terrain of the sovereign, there exists a far more complex geography of the state that must be negotiated to claim rights. The ‘right to have rights’ is necessarily an embodied po...
Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over hu... more Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governan...
Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over hu... more Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governan...
Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policie... more Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policies, or designations like “immigrant” or “refugee.” Where there is no formal protection or legal status, people seek, forge, and find safe haven in other ways, by other means, and by necessity. In this article, I argue that U.S. war resisters to Canada forged safe haven through broadly based social movements. I develop this argument through examination of U.S. war-resister histories, focusing on two generations: U.S. citizens who came during the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam and, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Resisters and activists forged refuge through alternative paths to protection, including the creation of shelter, the pursuit of time-space trajectories that carried people away from war and militarism, the formation of social movements across the Canada-U.S. border, and legal challenges to state policies and practices.
The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet t... more The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet there has been no systematic account of its construction. Boats, Borders, and Bases traces the rise of detention through Cold War efforts to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants from arriving in the United States by boat. Caribbean migration and deterrence efforts are related to much-better-known policies that have shaped the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This account situates both the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico boundary within maritime and territorial grounds of U.S. empire. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account brings together histories of refugee resettlement, asylum, and criminalization to explore the racialization and interrelations in these policies. The turn to criminalize migration in the 1980s built upon both domestic crime politics and efforts to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers. The location of detention facilities in relatively remote places is not determined by formal ...
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neolib... more The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effect...
In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on insti... more In this paper we unpack how geographers have studied institutions, focusing specifically on institutional ethnography, often called ‘IE’. Sociologist Dorothy Smith is widely credited with developing institutional ethnography as an ‘embodied’ feminist approach. Smith studies the experiences of women in daily life, and the complex social relations in which these are embedded. Institutional ethnography offers the possibility to study up to understand the differential effects of institutions within and beyond institutional spaces and associated productions of subjectivities and material inequalities. We suggest that geographical scholarship on institutions can be enhanced and, in turn, has much to contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field on institutional ethnography, such as understandings of institutions that account for spatial differentiation. We argue that IE holds potential to enrich geographical research not only about a multitude of kinds of institutions, but about the m...
As I planned and conducted a research project on the geopolitical consequences of contemporary US... more As I planned and conducted a research project on the geopolitical consequences of contemporary US migrant detention and deportation policies, I realized that the project would not fit neatly within any definition of “the political” that did not simultaneously ...
Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the proble... more Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the problematic political relationship between states and refugees highlighted b yHannah Arendt, shifting geopolitical, legal, and sovereign geographies have exacerbated the unevenness of refugees’ ability to claim the right to seek asylum. In this article, we employ a framework of embodied epistemologies to extend Arendt’s insights into the role of the stateless for sovereign logics. We argue that the ‘right to have rights’ as an embodied possibility is not only integral to the logics of sovereignty, but also to the creation of new political spaces. Our article draws on collaborative case studies in Guam/ Northern Marianas Islands, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. We argue that while Arendt paid singular attention to the terrain of the sovereign, there exists a far more complex geography of the state that must be negotiated to claim rights. The ‘right to have rights’ is necessarily an embodied po...
Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over hu... more Island and maritime spaces between regions have become central places of recurrent crises over human migration and re-articulations of state sovereignty. Islands, the very sites where land meets water, are among the contested sites of struggle over entry and exclusion. In this paper, the Mediterranean is our main area of geographical inquiry. We explore the connections between crises of sovereignty, migration and islands, seeking to enhance connections between scholarship on migration and sovereignty. We argue that migration management and its geographical articulation on islands involve persistent reconfigurations of sovereignty, particularly evident during times of crisis over human migration. Such crises and re-articulations of sovereignty are creative uses of geography that repeatedly lead to a failure to protect human rights. To develop this argument, we bring feminist theorists of state sovereignty into conversation with political geographers. We move across scales of governan...
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