CFP: The Postcolonial Government of Citizenship and Migration, June 15th 2015, University of Sheffield, UK 

Throughout the 20th century, migration was shaped by imperial connections. Decolonisation brought population movements from (ex)colonies to (ex)metropoles. In this context, practices of citizenship were utilised to regulate mobility, to accommodate and restrict access to rights. The reception of new arrivals in European states often mirrored colonial relations, relying on hierarchies of race and ‘development’. Whilst contemporary migration is understood to be dominated by different demographic trends, this workshop aims to explore how the government of migration and citizenship continues to be pervaded by the logics, knowledges and practices of colonialism.

Rather than considering migration in isolation, this workshop explores how citizenship is inherently bound to the production of belonging and the formation of inside/outsider status. It aims to investigate the management of mobility and belonging across different colonial and neo-colonial sites. The workshop thus welcomes papers which speak to the following:

• Governing Migrants: How contemporary practices of regulation and control rely on colonial forms of subjectification and social order? How different forms of knowledge constitute ‘migrants’ (as victims, criminals, illegals etc.) and how this relates to methods of governing (policing strategies, deportation, military patrols etc.)?

• Regimes of Belonging: How different regimes of citizenship have related to migration and mobility? How notions of ‘belonging’ refashion and draw upon imperial representations and colonial difference (the ‘worker citizen’, the ‘assimilated migrant’, ‘failed asylum seeker’ etc.)?

• Postcolonial Citizenship. The promise (and limitations) of reflexive and hybridising accounts of identity, decolonised and post-national citizenship?

The workshop encourages participants to explore contemporary histories of inclusion/exclusion, the construction of internal/external borders and the interlocking nature of race, class, gender and sexuality in contemporary coloniality. Alongside an explicit focus on the government of migration and citizenship, it explicitly welcomes contributions which address the experiences of those targeted by government strategies and to practices of resistance, struggle and dis-identification.

Please send abstracts to Joe Turner joe.turner@sheffield.ac.uk Submission deadline 15th April