CCIG Book Launch - The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity / Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking

A special book launch event organised by the Open University and Centre for Citizenship, Identity and Governance (CCIG) to mark the publication of Dr Vicki Squire's The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity and Dr Rutvica Andrijasevic's Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking.

The speakers, Prof Engin Isin (Open University, UK), Prof Peter Nyers (McMaster University, Canada) and Prof Diane Perrons (LSE, UK) will be discussing the importance of a political reading of mobility and its gendered implications for contemporary studies of citizenship and security. The event will be followed by an informal reception.

THE CONTESTED POLITICS OF MOBILITY: BORDERZONES AND IRREGULARITY

Vicki Squire

Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years.

Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an ‘analytic of irregularity’. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging ‘borderzones’ that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term ‘illegal’ to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

Further information

MIGRATION, AGENCY AND CITIZENSHIP IN SEX TRAFFICKING

Rutvica Andrijasevic

This study aims to reset the agenda on sex trafficking. Methodologically daring, it brings poststructuralist approaches on migration, labour and political subjectivities to existing studies on European integration, labour markets and gender-based violence. By linking a number of scholarly debates and discursive areas that are not commonly brought together in studies on sex trafficking, the book sets out to expose the link between sex trafficking and the constitution of citizenship and advance a scholarly re-conceptualisation of ‘sex trafficking’ grounded in the particularity of the European situation. Based on original ethnographic interviews with migrant women in the sex sector, the book shifts the theorisation of sex trafficking away from the criminalisation paradigm and towards a new theory of agency and citizenship.

Further information