Migration scholars and NGOs have often sought to disassociate popular associations between criminality and immigration: migrants are not criminals, nor are they necessarily more likely to commit crime. But this risks ignoring important relationships between immigration and criminality, both ‘immigrant’ and ‘criminal’ for example, are set in opposition to the (good) citizen, both are important administrative categories for states, and comprise groups upon whom the state can exercise significant degrees of coercion. Both are highly racialised. There are also historical continuities: mobility has long been associated with criminality, through vagabondage and the problem of ‘masterless men’, gypsies and Roma, and ‘illegal immigrants’. Both groups can share social and political disabilities – in the US former prisoners are not eligible for further education grants, cannot access welfare payments or food stamps, and in 10 states, are denied the right to vote for life. This seminar series will interrogate the relation between immigration, criminality and citizenship, by exploring these issues.
Follow the COMPAS Seminar Series weekly discussion question on the COMPAS facebook page. Each week a new question will be posed based on the week’s seminar, which we invite you to get involved in.
Punishment and Migration between Europe and the United States: A Globalized "Less Eligibility”?
Dario Melossi, University of Bologna –Presentation Notes (.pdf)
Ambivalence and Detention
Mary Bosworth, University of Oxford
(podcast unavailable on speaker’s request)
No rights for the wicked: human rights and foreign national prisoners
Fran Webber, Institute of Race Relations
Crime or Survival? - the management of victims of trafficking, smuggling and enforced labour through the Criminal Justice and Immigration Systems
Liz Hales, University of Cambridge
(podcast unavailable on speaker’s request)
Where's your bloody pigtail?: Liberalism, Empire, and the Chinese Labour Question
David Glover, University of Southampton
Distant Identification and mobility Control: Police sciences, technology, and international cooperation in West Europe, 1900-1930
Ilsen About, Institut de recherches interdisciplinaires sur les enjeux sociaux
Immigration and welfare chauvinism: Britain since 1800
David Feldman, Birkbeck, University of London
Cities, Citizenship, and the Migrant Metropolis: Life Within and Against the Spaces of the Law
Nicholas de Genova, Goldsmiths, University of London
Seminar Series Hilary 2013
Seminar Series Michaelmas 2011
Seminar Series Michaelmas 2010
Seminar Series Trinity Term 2009
Seminar Series Hilary Term 2007
Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2006
Seminar Series Hilary Term 2006
COMPAS, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6QS
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