Message posted on 04/03/2021

Fwd: Call for book chapters Governing migration through paperwork

Dear all,

We are inviting contributions for our book proposal, to be submitted to Berghahn – Lifeworlds: Knowledges, politics, histories. We thought that given your interest in materiality and migration, maybe some of you would be interested in joining us for this project – building on a special issue that we edited last year.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you are interested, All our best, Sophie and Lisa


CfP: Governing Migration through Paperwork (Il)legible exchanges in street-level bureaucracies Edited by: Dr. Lisa Marie Borrelli and Dr. Sophie Andreetta

Abstract (long version attached) In order to better understand migration governance and the concrete, daily practices of civil servants tasked to enforce state laws and policies, this book will focus on the core artefact of bureaucratic work: documents, in their diverse manifestations, including certificates, letters, reports, case files, decisions, internal guidelines and judgements. The various chapters will show how civil servants produce statehood, restrict migrants’ movements, and engage with migrants’ strategies to make themselves legible. State actors simultaneously limit access to legal statutes and benefits, question their own practices, and use their discretion in order to help themselves as well as migrant individuals. We also highlight organizational and professional differences in the way civil servants deal with migrants, relate to the state and its policies and define their obligations towards both, migrants and the state. This book therefore contributes to the study of the state as documentary practice and highlights the role of paperwork as serious practice of migration control

The book is based on an already published special issue, published in the Journal of Legal Anthropology (see Borrelli, L. M. and Andreetta, S. (2019). Introduction. Governing migration through paperwork. Journal of Legal Anthropology 3(2): 1-9. Doi: 10.3167/jla.2019.030201). We are thus searching for 1-2 chapters which we could add to the theme.

TIMELINE 15/04/2021 – submission of abstracts to guest editors 15/06/2021 – submission of complete drafts 1/07/2021 – feedback from guest editors 1/09/2021 – submission of final articles

Interested contributors are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to sandreetta@uliege.be and lisa.borrelli@hevs.ch by April 15th, 2021. Contributors can expect to receive a response from the editor by April 20th, 2021. Final chapter drafts are due on June 15, 2021. The proposal should also include a short biographical note. Complete chapter lengths should be around 9000 (not going over 10000) words (all included).

Be green, keep it on the screen

view as plain text

EASST-Eurograd RSS

mailing list
30 recent messages