Conflicts of Mobility.
Migration, Labour and Political Subjectivities
Special Issue of Subjectivity
Guest editors:
Dr. Rutvica Andrijasevic & Dr. Bridget Anderson, University of Oxford
CALL FOR PAPERS
Migration has been and continues to be is a constituent force in the production of the modern polity and citizenship. Dynamics of migration exceed the pursuit of visibility and rights and urge us to re-think the modernist dichotomies that still structure the definition and concept of state sovereignty and the political forms of belonging. Against the predominant trend to discuss migration in the language of inclusion vs exclusion; labour as a matter of waged labour vs slavery (free vs forced labour); and migrants in terms of victims vs agents (or aliens vs citizens), this special issue calls for contributions that identify and investigate new forms of subjectivity induced by contemporary forms of mobility and labour.
This issue will open new theoretical and methodological possibilities by shifting the analysis of migration away from subjectivity as a passive discursive construction towards migration as a site of subjectivation understood in terms of a generative/affirmative process of subject's construction. This issue will therefore attempt to theorize on how agency and subjectivity emerge from constraint and to recognize the specificity of particular struggles articulated across both symbolic and material terrains. The authors are invited to address the importance of interrogating the modes of subjectivity engendered by the conditions of transnational mobility as well as discussing the ways in which migrants' practices of mobility reconfigure political space for rethinking of citizenship and sovereignty and for advancing a more nuanced analysis of present configuration of power and its global contestations.
Papers combining theoretical and conceptual work with a more detailed empirical analysis are particularly welcome. Possible topics of interests:
* migration, governmentality and transformation of sovereignty
* borders and conflicts of mobility
* movements of migration and political subjectivities
* history of migratory subjectivity
* racial and gendered making of citizenship
* practices of citizenship
* affective investments and transnational mobility
* issues of intimacy, sexuality and the conditions of citizenship
* genealogies of workers' struggles, global and temporal regimes of labour, and shifting conditions of labour
* migration and the politics of cultural (re)production
Send expressions of interest with short proposal for possible contributions to
Rutvica.Andrijasevic@compas.ox.ac.uk by 30th September 2008 at the latest. Once a proposal is accepted authors will be asked to submit full papers by 15th January 2009. Full papers will go then through the peer-review process.
