A space of interrogation: opening the black box of asylum adjudication 

I examine the spatiality and practice of asylum adjudication in the context of the Danish asylum system. People who make an asylum claim in Denmark are required to participate in interviews conducted by the Danish Immigration Service. These interviews serve as the principal way through which the Danish state gathers evidence, assesses a person’s credibility, and determines an asylum claim. Bringing together insights from feminist political geography and feminist legal theory, I conceptualize the asylum interview as a quasi-legal space marked by wildly uneven but also uncertain power relations. I illustrate how the asylum interview and its ‘internal’ power dynamics are connected to and informed by other geographical sites, policing practices, and imaginations across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales. While state authorities and politicians often represent the asylum interviews and the spaces in which they take place as impartial and sequestered from politics of any kind, I argue that the asylum interview is more akin to the quasi-legal dynamic of police interrogations. 

Dr Malene Jacobsen is a NUAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. She is a feminist political geographer working at the intersection of political geography, critical refugee studies, and feminist legal theory. Malene has published on issues related to the geographies of war and refuge, families’ struggles to end forced separation, the politics of dispossession and refusal, as well as the legal re-writing of refugee protection. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Malene recently completed the EU-funded research project ‘JustAsylum’, which explored the lived realities and spaces of asylum adjudication.

Eunjung Kim’s research and teaching interests include transnational feminist disability studies; theories of vulnerability and human/nonhuman boundaries; Korean cultural history of disability, gender, and sexuality and anti-violence feminist disability movements; Asian feminisms and women’s movements; critical humanitarian communications and human rights; asexuality and queer theories. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript on violence against people with disabilities and illnesses, health justice activisms, posthumous care, and the ecology of aging and dying in South Korea and beyond.

Zomm Link: TBD

"Necropolitics, Border Walls, and a Murder of Jim/Juan Crow in the Mexico-US Frontera"

Across the Mexico-US borderlands, overlapping white supremacist and Anglo-nationalist movements are building private walls as monuments to Donald Trump. Many social justice activists and ecological stewards have warned that these Trumpist border walls present specific and new threats to social and ecological landscapes, particularly along the riparian sections of the borderlands. To slow their building and, even, topple these walls, many activists and ecological caretakers are working to fortify networks with similar efforts elsewhere. In an effort to provide analyses useful to such justice endeavors, I employ Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to situate the borderland activist struggles against the Trumpist walls within a broader context of struggle against the commemoration of racist terror in the US South. Specifically, I use Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitical deathworlds to illustrate some potential common cause linking protests against Trumpist walls in the Paso del Norte region of the Mexico-US border with a Black Lives Matter/Say Her Name coalition that is bringing down Confederate monuments in central Texas. In placing these movements in connection with each other, I highlight a synergy of the white supremacy of Jim Crow with the Anglo nationalism behind a Juan Crow variant of racist terror and anti-immigrant hatred driving the Trumpist wall constructions. Recognition of this convergence is one way, I maintain, for identifying opportunities for making common cause across Americas’ myriad struggles to destroy the racist monuments that glorify the necropolitical legacy of racist colonialism and its ongoing social and ecological devastation.

A native of Puerto Rico, Yomaira was born and raised in Hoboken, NJ and is a first-generation high school and college graduate. She is Associate Professor of Global Afro-Diaspora Studies in the department of English at Michigan State University. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick (Douglass College).

Zoom Link: TBD

Justice has been a reference point for radical and critical geographers for more than 40 years. Geographers’ engagements with issues of justice, however, have always been defined by wariness toward political philosophies of justice. These are variously considered too liberal, too distributive in their orientation, or too universalizing. The wariness, in short, indicates the parameters that define the prevalent spatial imaginary of radical and critical human geography: self-consciously oppositional, concerned with the production of structural relations, sensitive to context and difference. Barnett explore two overlapping strands of contemporary political philosophy and political theory that have recently developed arguments for ‘the priority of injustice’ in the elaboration of democratic theory.