The symposium will investigate the interplay between forms and modes of contemporary membership, migration governance (both immigration and emigration), and the politics of belonging. This will be achieved through in-depth examinations of a range of experiences of membership including, but not limited to: ethnic minorities; citizen children of undocumented migrant parents; former unaccompanied asylum seeking children; people with dual citizenship; ‘failed’ asylum seekers; and stateless people. Participants are invited to discuss issues such as the position of the non-citizen in contemporary immigration and emigration states; the nexus between human mobility, immigration control, and citizenship; the tension in policy and practice between coexisting traditions and regimes of rights; and the intersection of ‘race’ and other social cleavages and legal status.

This is the first of two international symposia investigating the relationship between legal status, rights and belonging. The symposia are jointly organised by the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford with the School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the Oxford Institute of Social Policy at the University of Oxford.

For more information visit the RSC page: Within and beyond citizenship: Lived Experiences of Contemporary Membership

Podcasts of the conference plenaries are available:

Feeling like a citizen, living as a denizen: deportees’ sense of belonging
Tanya Golash Boza, University of California Merced

Lives in limbo; immigration, schooling, and the and the transition to illegality
Roberto. G. Gonzales, Harvard University

Citizenship Shadow: obscene inclusion, abject belonging, or, the regularities of migrant irregularity
Nicholas de Genova, Goldsmiths College

Campzenship: rethinking the camp as a political space
Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham