This week, Indonesian domestic worker Erwiana Sulistyaningsih responded to the sentencing of the Hong Kong employer who severely physically abused her for many months with a call for the reform of domestic worker regulations, pointedly stating: “I hope the Hong Kong government can soon recognise we are workers in Hong Kong and we are not slaves.” In Italy, thousands attended an anti-immigration rally in Rome, while a counter-demonstration took place only a few hundred metres away; both held in large part as responses to Italy’s struggles to cope with the large numbers of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Libya and Syria. In the US, Ernesto Javier Canepa Diaz was shot dead by police in Santa Ana, California. He was the third Mexican national to be killed by police in the country in the last month, and his death prompted condemnations and calls for response from the Mexican government and civil rights organizations. These stories, which represent only a tiny percentage of those filed with global news organizations on the topic of international immigration in just the last seven days, point instructively, and tragically, to some of the forms of violence that attend contemporary movements of people across borders as those movements come up against nationalist ideals, notions of identity and difference, austerity politics, security regimes, uneven labour geographies, and more.
Activists and policy-makers in countless sites respond in manifold ways to such violences, while scholars everywhere work to bolster these efforts. With this virtual theme issue, we, the Society and Space editors, have selected 17 pieces from the archives of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and Environment and Planning A that fit within the frame of critical migration scholarship. The pieces grapple with a wide range of issues including asylum policy and practice, immigrant detention, immigration law, temporary foreign labour politics, sexual citizenship, international governance, disease, diaspora, and nationalist identity. As is typical within the journals’ pages, conceptually, the authors deploy diverse analytical tools such as psychoanalytic thought, critical race theory, queer theory, and much more, and geographically, they cover numerous sites.
Like all of our virtual theme issues, we offer this work open access (if unfortunately only for a limited time) so that it might re-circulate, gain new audiences, and thus charge and recharge debates. The following pieces will be free to access until June 3, 2015:
Hiemstra N, 2014, “Performing homeland security within the US immigrant detention system” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(4) 571 – 588
Shubin S, Findlay A, McCollum D, 2014, “Imaginaries of the ideal migrant worker: a Lacanian interpretation” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(3) 466 – 483
Steil J, Ridgley J, 2012, “‘Small-town defenders’: the production of citizenship and belonging in Hazleton, Pennsylvania” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(6) 1028 – 1045
Martin L, 2012, “Review essay. Detaining noncitizens: law, security, crime and politics” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(4) 748 – 755
Rogaly B, Thieme S, 2012, “Experiencing space–time: the stretched lifeworlds of migrant workers in India” Environment and Planning A 44(9) 2086 – 2100
Oswin N, 2012, “The queer time of creative urbanism: family, futurity, and global city Singapore” Environment and Planning A 44(7) 1624 – 1640
Andrijasevic R, Walters W, 2010, “The International Organization for Migration and the international government of borders” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(6) 977 – 999
van Houtum H, 2010, “Human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the EU’s external border regime” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(6) 957 – 976
Conlon D, 2010, “Ties that bind: governmentality, the state, and asylum in contemporary Ireland” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1) 95 – 111
Darling J, 2009, “Becoming bare life: asylum, hospitality, and the politics of encampment” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(4) 649 – 665
Dikeç M, 2009, “The ‘where’ of asylum” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(2) 183 – 189
Coleman M, 2008, “US immigration law and its geographies of social control: lessons from homosexual exclusion during the Cold War” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(6) 1096 – 1114
Ingram A, 2008, “Domopolitics and disease: HIV/AIDS, immigration, and asylum in the UK” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 875 – 894
Yeh E T, 2007, “Exile meets homeland: politics, performance, and authenticity in the Tibetan diaspora” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(4) 648 – 667
Ehrkamp P, 2006, “‘We Turks are no Germans’: assimilation discourses and the dialectical construction of identities in Germany” Environment and Planning A 38(9) 1673 – 1692
Rand E, 2003, “Breeders on a golf ball: normalizing sex at Ellis Island” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21(4) 441 – 460
Fincher R, 2001, “Immigration research in the politics of an anxious nation” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19(1) 25 – 42
