Immigration Controls, Captivity and Reproductive Injustice in Britain: Punishing illegalised migrant women from the Global South and separating children from their mothers
Dr Monish Bhatia (Birkbeck University of London)
Wednesday, 19 January 2022, 5pm to 6.30pm
via Zoom
Hosted by Refugee Studies Centre
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2022
Race, Borders, and Global (Im)mobility
Series convenor: Dr Hanno Brankamp, Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration
This seminar series critically interrogates the ways in which militarised borders, migration enforcement, and their racial orderings continue to be normalised on a global scale. The political drive towards expanding walls, policing infrastructures, camps, detention centres, interceptions at sea, push backs, deportations, surveillance, and racist immigration policies that restrict asylum and migration is hereby not only a legacy of past empires but is also indicative of new emerging geographies of (im)mobility, racialisation, and liberal violence. Speakers in this series come from a range of disciplines and will examine global migration through questions of race and racism, coloniality, nationalism, citizenship, belonging, criminalisation, and bordering.
Series poster (pdf)
About the seminar
The aim of this paper is to show how race, gender, class, sexuality, marital and migration status intersect to oppress, control and discipline poor and illegalised single migrant mothers and pregnant individuals from the Global South. Drawing upon evidence from three ethnographic studies conducted over a ten-year period, the article sheds light on the predicaments of women excluded from the welfare safety-net, who were flying under the radar due to the fear of deportation. It shows the ways in which the immigration and crime controls in Britain render them vulnerable to victimisation and harms. The major part of the article addresses the issues of imprisonment and punishment, treatment by the criminal justice system, and separation from children (who were put in foster care). The evidence strongly suggests that these controls disrupts the core principles of reproductive justice. This includes, reproductive autonomy and health, the right to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent the child in safe and healthy environment without fear. This amounts to racialised-gendered state violence.
Registration
This seminar will be held online via Zoom. Register here