A conference with international scholars considering the criminalization of migration.
Register here.
In recent years, successive migration “crises” have propelled borders to the center of media attention, political debate, and collective moral imaginaries. At the same time, the criminalization of migration has become increasingly integrated through practices of border externalization, the modular adaptations of surveillance regimes, and the systematic persecution of border-crossing. Bringing together international scholars and activists, this one-day conference will unearth not only the connections between national and transnational practices for governing mobility, but also how international frameworks for criminalizing migration become entangled with local disciplinary regimes, moral idioms, and political interests. How does the penal regime of the border borrow from criminological paradigms used to prosecute the Mafia, terrorism, and organized subversion? What moral, political, and religious frameworks do states use to criminalize migration, including through the appropriation and manipulation of border death? How do migrants, smugglers, and humanitarians resist or subvert those frameworks, mobilizing their own interpretation of borders and their discontents?
This conference is organized by the Institute for Social and Economic Research with the support of the Department of Anthropology and The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
Please see the schedule below:
9:30-10:00 - Opening remarks and welcome
10:00-11:30 - Panel 1: Genealogies of a Criminological Paradigm
Soledad Álvarez Velasco (University of Illinois). Title to be confirmed.
Chloe Howe Haralambous (Columbia Univeristy). ‘Crimes of association: Solidarity and subterfuge in the Mediterranean passage’.
Hassan Ould Moctar London (School of Economics). ‘Confining capital’s outcasts: Notes on externalisation, dispossession, and detention in Mauritania’.
Discussant: Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center)
11:30-12:00 - Coffee break
12:00-13:30 - Panel 2: The Politics of Facilitation
Luigi Achilli (European University Institute). ‘The Game: Smuggling networks and state complicity in intra-European migration’.
Richard Braude (ARCI, Italy). ‘“Re-educating” the smuggler, or What do smugglers think about prison?’
Debdatta Chowdhury (CSSSC, India). ‘The practice and politics of human mobility across the Bengal borderland’.
Discussant: Giulia Serio (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
13:30-14:30 - Lunch
14:30-16:00 – Panel 3: The Political Life of Border Death
Osman Balkan (University of Pennsylvania). ‘Border deaths and the politics of mourning’.
Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University). ‘Criminalization and last rites: Italian anti-migrant policies as a response to border death’.
Robin Reineke (University of Arizona). Title to be confirmed.
Discussant: José Pablo Brayabar do Carmo (Forensic Anthropologist)
16:00-16:30 – Coffee break
16:30 -18:00 – Roundtable
Naor Ben-Yehoyada (Columbia University)
Tejal Jesrani (Director, TrialWatch, Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute)
José Pablo Brayabar do Carmo (Forensic Anthropologist)
Giulia Serio (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center)
cover photo © Max Hirzel
