Panel proposal IMISCOE 2025, 1-4 July 2025 Paris-Aubervilliers
Call for Papers: Decentring research on deportation governance programs, practices and experiences from the Global North (on site)
Chairs: Rossella Marino (UGent) & Laura Cleton (EUR)
Discussant: TBA
Abstract:
This panel seeks to bring together scholars who aim to decenter research on the programs, practices and experiences that shape deportation governance in the Global North. The study of deportation in Europe and the US, broadly understood as “the compulsory return of non-citizens to their country of nationality” (Walters 2002), has long animated scholars of migration and citizenship. Despite now having evolved to a consolidated subfield of “deportation studies” (Coutin 2015), we hold that this body of scholarship to a large extent reflects a Eurocentric/Global North bias, in terms of geography, epistemology and methodology. Geographically, English-language scholarship has predominantly theorized deportation in relation to the functions it has for Global North states, whether for purposes of population management (Walters 2002, Kanstroom 2007) or the understanding of membership and belonging (Anderson et al. 2011). Epistemologically, scholars theorizing deportation have touched upon the legacies of slavery and colonialism (Kanstroom 2007, Lemberg-Pedersen 2022, McNeil 2023) but rarely center black feminist, postcolonial or indigenous epistemologies to their work. Methodologically, case studies in Global North bureaucracies and among ‘deportable’ populations have long prevailed, whereas more recent studies on the core importance of Global South states (El Qadim 2014, Zardo & Loschi 2022, Zanker & Altrogge 2022) and deportations within the Global South (Sutton & Vigneswaran 2011, Lecadet 2012, Walters 2020) show the difference. Some recent interventions additionally refer to the challenges of decentring, as researcher positionality significantly impacts the extent to which research can actually move away from Eurocentric understandings and Global North biases (Pastore 2023; Cuttitta et al. 2023). This panel aims to bring together scholars who work along these lines, and welcomes paper proposals in the following areas:
- Geographic decentering: studies that theorize deportation governance in relation to Global South governments, communities, state-building practices and social relations. We would be keen to dialogue with scholars who (predominantly/primarily) publish in other languages than English.
- Epistemological decentering: studies that deploy critical methodologies to deportation governance from the Global North or within the Global South, such as (but not limited to) (black) feminist theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, indigenous studies.
- Methodological decentering: studies that privilege the perspectives, experiences and practices of illegalized migrants and other Global South actors; studies that take transnational approaches; studies that deploy creative methodologies to study deportation.
Submit a 250-word abstract and the name(s), affiliation(s), and contact details of the author(s) to Rossella Marino (
(