Introduction

This issue of Law Text Culture has its genesis in a research project on Mobile Peoples Under the Eye of the Law which was originally proposed by Associate Professor Cathy Coleborne at the University of Waikato. The project was supported with a grant for a one day symposium, held in December 2010, from the University of Waikato Contrestable Research Trust Fund, for which we are grateful. As guest editors we invited contributions of postcolonial analyses that investigated mobile peoples, in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, both historically and in the present. We were especially interested in the ways in which regulation and surveillance in all of its forms — legal, policy, administrative and so forth — produced and constructed mobile peoples, and how categories of gender and sexuality were shaped in relation to mobile peoples in and through these regimes