Spring Research Academy

Over the last two years, the world has been witness to the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, fueled by policies like the deployment of Title 42 - which since the Trump administration has been used to systematically expel people arriving to US territory seeking protection. 

Title 42 has left us with unforgettable memories: hundreds of people turning themselves to US immigration authorities, crossing the Rio Grande or lining up next to the border fence; the harrowing events in Del Rio, where Haitian migrants were whipped by US Border Patrol agents on horseback; and the San Antonio tragedy, where dozens of young people lost their lives; the preventable deaths of children - many of them indigenous origin -; and records numbers of people in the Americas and the Caribbean who have gone missing on the migration pathway. 

The high visibility of all these events has helped cement the widespread perception of 'the border' as a space in a permanent state of crisis: a region and communities with no viable solutions to propose, let alone implement, aside from allowing for their continued surveillance and criminalization. At the same time, there is a vast body of policy and academic work which has been critical of border militarization and controls; of immigration enforcement and its implications on human security; and how these are gendered and racialized. Both perspectives seem irreconcilable. And so therefore, the question emerges: is there, in a context this contentious, an opportunity to move beyond the critique to articulate, re/imagine and effectively propose new futures and scenarios for this and other borders? What would this involve?

Seeking to respond to a long-standing gap working towards "constructing alternative 'imaginaries' [Huges, 2007 in Weber 2016] in the current literature on critical border studies and migration, participants will develop individual and/or collaborative contributions envisioning a new protection agenda beyond the illusions of statism and improbable change created by the discourse of migration control and border enforcement. The academy's goal, to echo Weber, is to provide a space "to think expansively and contemplate how transformed empirical conditions may alter the moral calculus of border control in as yet unrecognized ways" (2016).