We would like to extend our invitation to the public lecture of Prof. Dr. Carolina Alonso Bejarano (Warwick University) on Tuesday 22nd April 2025, 17h30.
Based on archival data from across New Jersey, USA, news articles, town hall records and interviews with local residents, this lecture traces a genealogy of the legal construction of the un/citizen in “Hometown,” a small town in New Jersey and the field site of her first book Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science.
It elucidates the relationship between immigrants’ rights organizing and the local production of immigrant illegality in the US within the larger context of the histories of state violence against Black Americans and Native Americans. How do different colonial systems of illegalization legitimize themselves through racialized distinctions between “citizens” and “non-citizens,” which are concomitantly mapped onto social space and sedimented through time?
The lecture addresses this question by critically juxtaposing the history of Hometown’s colonial legal legacy with the story of a contemporary campaign, a “magical coalition” that empowered racialized US citizens and undocumented Latin American residents to organize together against discriminatory local legislation. In an era of intensified white supremacist logics enforced at the national and local levels, this lecture considers the potential for a coalitional politics capable of countering intersecting colonial technologies of domination
The keynote will be opened with a small reception at 16h30, so we kindly request that you register in advance (deadline Thursday 17/04) : https://event.ugent.be/registration/fieldwork2025
This keynote is part of our broader Spring School program www.fieldwork2025.org