Emerging Logics of Citizenship: Activism in Response to Precarious Migration and Gendered Violence in an Era of Securitization

Postnationalism is a theory of citizenship that emerged in the 1990s, which rejected national membership as an exclusionary or limited way of organizing rights and belonging, and sought instead to re-imagine citizenship beyond the nation-state. The approach was largely discredited at the time for underestimating the persistent influence of nationalism and for lacking empirical evidence. In this project, I join a small group of scholars who argue for a reconsideration of postnationalism, particularly for scholarship examining the production of illegality and securitization of borders across countries in the global north. I add to this scholarship by offering an extended case analysis of postnational activism in Toronto, in response to major restructuring of Canada’s refugee and immigration system and expanded deportation regime between 2006 to 2015. Using ethnographic fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and discourse analysis, I show how some activists used postnational human rights frames to restrict immigration authorities from entering schools, women’s shelters, and other city spaces for the purposes of investigating and deporting non-status migrants. Theorized as postnational acts of citizenship, such approaches were useful for exposing the structural violence produced through state regulation of borders and citizenship, leading to the articulation of a ‘no borders’ politics. However, as a social movement strategy, postnational claims were also limited in their capacity to imagine alternatives to state protection, particularly for non-status women in situations of gender-based violence. My findings also point to the erosion of citizenship for a group of activists working as service providers within state-funded institutions, where processes of securitization altered their working conditions and produced feelings of fear, despair, and even terror in how they interpreted the actions of the Conservative party in power at the time. Overall, this research draws attention to the increased salience of postnationalism for studies of social inequality in the contemporary immigration context.Ph.D.2019-11-01 00:00:0