We invite you to the eighth session of the seminar Racial Capitalism, Borders and Migrations in the Anthropology Laboratory (Laboratorio de Antropologia) on Wednesday 18 February at 12pm.
This time we welcome Bridget Anderson from the University of Bristol.
Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Lecturer in Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. She is interested in the relationship between migration, race and nation, historically and in the contemporary world. She takes as her starting point that the “migrant” and the “citizen” and the differences between them are constructed in law and in social and political practice. She is particularly interested in how immigration laws make particular types of employment relationships, and her current research includes the EU-funded project PRIME – Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe. His recent edited volume: Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship, Race is published by Bristol University Press and is open access.
The title of the seminar is: ‘Time, Space, Status: Migration and Racial Capitalism’
Here are the summary of the presentation and her biography:
Abstract: By attending to temporality, migrantisation, and the politics of precarity, this talk explores how racial capitalism governs through time, space, and status. It argues that migration should be analysed, not as a disruption to national labour markets, but as a constitutive element of global racial capitalism, and that it is crucial to reconfigure political alliances between citizens and non-citizens. I will begin by asking, if humans have always moved, when does movement become migration? The answers show how political this seemingly neutral category and I argue that public understandings of the migrant as poor and racialised reflect the logics of immigration regimes that use race and class to govern movement. I will then consider precarity, thinking with and against migration, focussing on how both citizens and migrants are subject to precarious work exacerbated by controls over time and mobility. These controls are exercised using different policy frameworks for both groups, but all experience a sense of lack of control over their lives and futures. Through attending to immigration controls we can see that skill is an important factor in inducing precarity, so I follow that clue to explore what migration tells us about the role of ideas of skill in labour markets more generally. Finding similarities and shared interests across differences is necessary to the deeply embedded and highly affective tropes that are powerfully at work in our politics and repositioning the migrant as a co-worker rather than a competitor for privileges of membership.
Bio: Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. She is interested in the relation between migration, race, and nation, historically and in the contemporary world. She takes as her starting point that the ‘migrant’ and the ‘citizen’ and the differences between them are constructed in law and in social and political practice. She is particularly interested in how immigration laws make particular kinds of employment relationships, and her current research includes the EU funded project PRIME – Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe. Her recent edited volume: Rethinking Migration: Challenging Borders, Citizenship, Race is published by Bristol University Press and is open access.
Recent Comments