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Researching anti-deportation: Socialization as...
Chapter

Researching anti-deportation: Socialization as method

Abstract

My research on anti-deportation has aimed to make both an empirical and theoretical contribution. Empirically, I have examined the specific ways that anti-deportation campaigns challenge some of the most exclusionary and coercive powers of the state. More to the point, I wanted to illustrate how these campaigns can, in fact, succeed (albeit with limitations) in a climate of securitized anxiety about refugees and non-status migrants. In doing so, I have avoided the temptation to formalize, assimilate, or integrate the political agency of non-status refugees into preexisted categories or frameworks. Instead, I have aimed to liberate some of the key concepts of political theory - citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and community - from their liberal pretensions, elitist enclaves, statist spatio-temporal orientations, and assumed subjects. Most fundamentally in this respect, I have sought to investigate citizenship as a site of struggle, and not as a settled status, in order to better understand the political agency of precarious subjects who mobilize to make claims, demand rights, and thereby constitute themselves as political.

Authors

Nyers P

Book title

Research Methods in Critical Security Studies an Introduction

Pagination

pp. 97-100

Publication Date

January 1, 2013

DOI

10.4324/9780203107119-24
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