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![Traditional media outlets and the online petition created by Maribel Trujillo Diaz's deportation defense campaign featured an image of her surrounded by her family [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]](profile/Austin-Kocher/publication/343538939/figure/fig2/AS:951691344084992@1603912306314/Traditional-media-outlets-and-the-online-petition-created-by-Maribel-Trujillo-Diazs.png)
Traditional media outlets and the online petition created by Maribel Trujillo Diaz's deportation defense campaign featured an image of her surrounded by her family [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
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Undocumented activism is on the rise. In response to the expansion of immigrant policing, detention, and deportation, immigrant rights organisers have increasingly deployed a longstanding approach to anti‐deportation activism called “deportation defense campaigns” (DDCs). DDCs seek to disrupt the deportation regime by preventing or delaying individ...
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... motherhood was also shown prominently in the photograph that accompanied her petition and was shared with the press. In the photo, Maribel is sitting on a chair holding the youngest of her four children while her three older children are standing around her and her husband, who is also seated (see Figure 2). The image reinforced a statement from the Catholic church that emphasized her children's US citizenship and described how Maribel's youngest daughter, three years old in 2017, had health concerns which only Maribel was fully trained to care for (Archdiocese of Cincinnati 2017a). ...
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... Vaikka kirkot ovat vedonneet esimerkiksi lainsäätäjiin inhimillisemmän turvapaikkapolitiikan puolesta, suurin osa uutisoinnista ja mahdollisesti myös kirkkojen käytännön vaikuttamisesta kohdistuu yksittäisten maasta poistettavien tilanteiden muuttamiseksi paremmaksi. Toisaalta erilaisten protestien tarkka rajaaminen ja luokittelu ei välttämättä ole mielekästäkään (Kocher & Stuesse, 2021). Maastapoistamisia tutkinut Eveliina Lyytinen (2021:10) tuo myös esille, että yksittäistilanteeseen kohdistunut protesti voi muuntua laajemmaksi, reformatiiviseksi protestiksi. ...
Artikkeli tarkastelee kirkko- ja seurakuntien maasta poistamisten protesteja Leila Hadj Abdoun ja Sieglinde Rosenbergerin (2019) teoretisoimaa muutospyrkimysten typologiaa mukaillen. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu vuosina 2007–2021 julkaistuista sanomalehtiartikkeleista, jotka käsittelevät kirkkojen ja seurakuntien maasta poistamisia haastavaa työtä. Tulosten mukaan kirkko- ja seurakuntien työssä on sekä reformatiivisen että konsensushakuisen protestin piirteitä, joskin työn konsensushakuisuus korostuu erityisesti.
... Not through acceptance of exclusion nor through its denial, but through articulated constructions juxtaposing logics of both inclusion and exclusion" (Dos Santos 2015:199). To be sure, constructions of deservingness are a political strategy (Kocher and Stuesse 2021), but in the context of a pandemic, delineations of who is deserving of care and under what circumstances hold tremendous stakes. ...
Undocumented individuals in U.S. society have been barred from access to federal economic relief during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Increased visibility of the vulnerability of undocumented individuals may provide a window of opportunity for inclusive policies. On the contrary, previous research about pro-immigrant sentiment shows that supporters of undocumented migrants advocate for them by using discourse that ultimately reifies their exclusion. The current study uses Twitter data collected from March to July 2020 to examine public discourse on undocumented immigrants during the pandemic. Our research question is: “How do Twitter users frame deservingness of undocumented immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic?” We find that: (1) relief for undocumented immigrants continues to be contingent even in times of crisis, (2) economic productivity is a prerequisite of deservingness, and (3) anti-immigrant frames that scapegoat immigrants are flexible to the political and public health conditions of a historical period. Implications for policy are discussed.
... The successful employment of these discourses allows them to gain recognition as subjects "deserving" of a proper place within the national community. As several papers in this symposium analyse, undocumented activists in the United States relied on hegemonic tropes like nationhood (singing the national anthem), the family and work during anti-deportation campaigns and other actions (see Escudero and Pallares 2020;Kocher and Stuesse 2020). Rather than disrupt the order of things, some observers argue that these activists seek integration within it by exhibiting the attributes (assimilation, utility, innocence) that make them "good" candidates for membership. ...
... The symposium examines the specific conditions under which activists contend with the contradictory dynamics underlying the fight for rights and equality. In this symposium, Kocher and Stuesse (2020) go as far as to argue that undocumented migrants' act of embracing dominant language and projecting it back at the state provides opportunities for "disruptive conformity". The main question that emerges, then, is whether undocumented activism disrupts, merely interrupts or reinforces the status quo. ...
... For example, de Graauw's (2020) piece in this symposium emphasises how local institutional transformations in New York City and San Francisco ensure that political disruption outlasts momentary events. Likewise, preventing the deportation of vulnerable undocumented immigrants in the US is interpreted by Kocher and Stuesse (2020) and Escudero and Pallares (2020) as signs of a deportation machine running on fumes. ...
Scholarly interest in undocumented migrants’ struggles over citizenship has surged in recent years. Critical, theoretically inspired scholarship on the political has embraced these struggles as evidence that the current order can be disrupted. However, empirical studies of undocumented activism in the United States and Europe have revealed that pressures to conform to dominant norms and discourses, representational oligarchies and categorical fragmentation can lead activists to reproduce rather than disrupt the order. The papers in this symposium aim to advance this discussion by comparing the findings of case studies of undocumented immigrant struggles around the world. In this introduction to the symposium, we argue that disruption and reproduction constitute two logics of collective action that continually express themselves in immigrant rights mobilisations. We present a framework that outlines how undocumented activists navigate both logics in their ongoing quest to construct subjects, acts and spaces capable of disrupting the status quo.
Creative material practice, in both differing and similar ways to technological and digital creative processes, has the ability to engage young people who face barriers to mainstream education but who may lack digital literacy skills. This chapter will thus look at art-based social enterprises that engage with textiles and fashion with the specific aim of addressing barriers to employment for young creatives affected by the impacts of migration and displacement. How are craft and textile forms leveraged for learning models that engage young people who have had disengaged prior experiences of education or lacked prior schooling due to the dislocating effects of the migration experience? In the specific context of migration and displacement, material practice draws on cultural traditions and existing creative skills. These skills and aesthetic forms can be deliberately re-oriented to new marketplaces through contemporary fashion, craft and textile design, which in turn support young people to position themselves as creative actors in contemporary global culture/s. This potential is evident in examples of fashion and craft-based social enterprise across both developing and developed economies, and aligns with UNESCO’s advocacy for creative practice that builds on and sustains cultural practice. Yet with the realities of limited funding and the precarious market for fashion retail globally, how ambitious can fashion and craft based ASEs be in imagining their development and growth in terms of the scope and impact of the training programs they offer?
On 14 July 2017, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it would shorten the time period for holding eleven kinds of noncitizen detainee records and invited public comment on these changes. NARA stated that the decision to recategorize many of these records as “temporary” was because they held “little or no research value.” The files included records of abuse, assault, and deaths of people in immigration detention. Curious how NARA valued research, we designed a project asking what could be learned—about abuse in detention and NARA—from these documents. This article describes our methodological approach and our findings and discusses the implications of both for future research on immigration, government archiving practices, and accountability. We submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the eleven document types slated for earlier disposal and analyzed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s documentation of neglect and abuse in immigration detention. To do so, we traced the documents’ intertextuality, showing how each document relied on—and further produced—other documents. Challenging NARA’s calculative logics, we show that disposing of these documents would widen gaps, holes, and silences in an already partial, state-centric archive, limiting which future histories of U.S. immigration policies might be told.
In this afterword to the special issue on processes of politicization of activist struggles of undocumented migrants and their allies, I first briefly enumerate a number of key commonalities that run through the special issue. I subsequently explore some of the wider theoretical and practical lessons to be drawn from the arguments advanced in the special issue, and suggest a number of key themes and concerns to be explored further. In particular, the paper suggests some possible avenues to both think through the limits of and tensions within forms of undocumented migrant activism, and chart theoretical and practical trajectories to move from the limitations of ‘the political event’ to the possibilities of ‘a political sequence’ that may actually change the instituted order.
