Calls for the enhanced security at borders are increasing at an alarming rate and this is raising serious concerns about human rights, citizenship, mobility and surveillance. The title of the next event in the Migration Matters panel series “Borders and Securitization” addresses these issues. Participating in the panel are York Professors Robert Latham, Anna Pratt and Antonio Sorge and York postdoctoral Fellow Özgün Topak.
“Borders and Securitization” will take place Friday, Jan. 23, from 2 to 4:3opm in 1004 TEL and will feature a keynote address by Professor Audrey Macklin, professor and chair in human rights law in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, titled “Citizenship Revocation and the Privilege to Have Rights.” Macklin’s research and writing interests include transnational migration, citizenship, forced migration, feminist and cultural analysis and human rights. She has published on these subjects in journals such as Refuge and Canadian Woman Studies, and in collections of essays such as The Security of Freedom: Essays on Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Bill and Engendering Forced Migration. Macklin’s keynote will set the tone for the panel discussion.
York political science Professor Robert Latham’s presentation is titled “Rights, Movement, and Security: A Hopeless Cycle and Recurrence of the Same?” Latham is the author of numerous articles and books. He recently published “The Governance of Visibility: Bodies, Information, and the Politics of Anonymity across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” in the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. He is also part of an effort to found a new research program, Critical Scholarship and Social Transformation.
York social science Professor Anna Pratt’s paper, “Shiprider, Jurisdiction and the Re-Crafting of Border Control in Canada,” will address the recently introduced Canada-US Integrated Cross Border Law Enforcement Program known as Shiprider. She is the author of Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada and has carried out a major study of the culture and organization of front-line border control in Canada. Pratt has published findings on law and discretion, the crime-security nexus, racial profiling and risk.
York anthropology sessional Professor Antonio Sorge’s paper, The Uses and Abuses of History on Lampedusa will address his ongoing research on the experiences of the residents of the island of Lampedusa with influxes of undocumented migrants, focusing on the discordant dynamics of hospitality and xenophobia at the local level. He is the author of Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia.
Özgün Topak, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science, will present his research in a paper titled “Surveillance and Migrant Deaths at the Borders of the EU.” His doctoral research examined surveillance, subjectivity and resistance at the Greece-Turkey borders.