Kirwan Institute Brown Bag - July 2010
July 7 - Sovereignty in the City: Spatial Racialization and Immigration Enforcement
By Inés Valdez, PhD Candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (News Release)
Wednesday, July 7, at noon, room 423 Mendenhall Laboratory
Speaker Inés Valdez, Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, notes that the last two decades have witnessed a radical closing of the spaces for immigrants to circulate and occupy to conduct political action.
She suggests that a network of immigration enforcement has been layered over existing spatial features of the American landscape, examining the network of highways and transportation, the growth in work and home raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the expansion of the immigrant detention network. Valdez suggests that these entities constitute spaces of racialized policing. The transformation of these realms into secured spaces has reduced the capacity of migrants to access and create public spaces. The segregation of urban and suburban America, as well as the divergent meaning that such spaces elicit in non-racialized individuals, has hidden the expanding reach of the policing capacities of the state. The political action of immigrants, and particularly the undocumented, can only take place by entering a realm of politics that is formally closed to them.
Valdez explains why this political action is crucial to shape the meaning of membership and renegotiate the shape of the demos. She argues that the guarantee of a right to the city, that is, the existence of public spaces where immigrants can stage their claims, is central for the renewal of democratic regimes.
For more information, please contact Elsadig Elsheikh or Rajeev Ravisankar.
