Description

Prof. dr. Carolina Alonso Bejarano will deliver a public lecture on field work methodology, as part of the Spring School Re-imagining field work through creative methodologies and collaborative learning. This public lecture is open to all. 

Prof. Dr. Carolina Alonso Bejarano  is a scholar-activist, cartoonist, DJ, and associate professor of Law at Warwick University. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University. As a researcher and organizer, her interests lie at the intersection of art and the law, particularly in relation to the immigrants’ rights movement in the US. Over the past few years, she became a major voice in the inter-disciplinary debates on decolonizing fieldwork and ethnography, as the was the leading author of the influential book. Decolonizing ethnography : undocumented immigrants and new directions in social science (Duke University Press, London/Durham). She has  published extensively on questions of reflexivity and positionality along the insider-outsider position of researchers in fieldwork. 

Genealogies of the Un/Citizen in “Hometown,” USA: From Colonial New Jersey to the Magical Coalition

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 my 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