Protesting Citizenship ─ Migrant Activisms

What does it mean to state ‘No One is Illegal?’. This rallying call is what unifies migrant protests against exclusionary border regimes around the world, bringing migrants, citizens, `legal` and `illegal` people onto the streets in ever greater numbers. Indeed, the last decade has witnessed an explosion of immigrant protests, political mobilizations by irregular migrants and pro-migrant activists. This edited collection aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on migrant resistance movements and to consider the implications of these struggles for critical understandings of citizenship and borders. It offers a rich series of theoretical and political interventions which together explore the tensions between integrationist and autonomous approaches, and between migrant and activist strategies of invisibility and visibility. By bringing immigrant protests to the heart of debates about citizenship, it also extends discussions about the limits and the possibilities of citizenship as the material and conceptual horizon of critical social analysis, political participation and democracy today.

This book was published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Imogen Tyler is a Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. She has a longstanding interest in activism, protest and resistance and is the author of the monograph Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (2012).

Katarzyna Marciniak is Professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio University, USA. Katarzyna specializes in the discourses of immigration and foreignness, and is one of the initiators of transnational feminist media studies. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (2006), co-author of Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland (2010), and co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (2007).