LIST OF WORKSHOPS

Governments across Europe, the United States and other wealthy states are use a variety of techniques for regulating their borders and boundaries against unwanted ‘others’: externally, by means of militarized border controls (Besteman 2019) that prevent and contain the unwanted mobility of the global poor (Bosworth, Parmar, & Vázquez, 2018; Khosravi, 2019), and internally, through mass incarceration (Wacquant 2009), spatial segregation (Fassin, 2013) and stratification of rights among residents holding different legal residency status (Korteweg, 2017; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). These policies and policy practices enable states to govern social inequality on a local as well as global scale. The questions that the workshop aims to address include, but are not limited to, the following:
 
-       How can banishment as a form of social and spatial regulation be used as a lens for overcoming conventional divisions in research on global and local forms of inequality?
-       What laws and policies are used to enforce the spatial and social exclusion of ‘undesired’ populations across different states and urban areas today?
-       What continuities can we find in terms of their (colonial) historical configurations, in terms of their operation, and the groups targeted? 
-       How are contemporary forms of banishment enforced, and with what effects for those targeted?
-       How is banishment challenged and contested?
 
Banishment is a practice with significant history and embedded in law and policies, which allows societies at large to categorize and hierarchize between (un)wanted groups. There is a the steadily growing body of scholarship investigating, on the one hand, state practices of governing undesired noncitizens, which range from physical banishment via deportation (Khosravi, 2018), to the denial of fundamental rights (Suárez-Krabbe & Lindberg, 2019), and sovereign abandonment (Davies, Isakjee, & Dhesi, 2017) as well as strategic ignorance and targeted non-action of state actors (Borrelli, 2018; Stel, 2016, 2017). On the other hand, we find research on incarceration (Wacquant 2009), urban segregation (Fassin 2013), and policing of poverty and destitution (Desmond 2016; Flint 2019). However, very limited attention has been paid to how these practices in part overlap and intersect in terms of its underlying (neoliberal and securitizing) logics, and with regard to the racialized, gendered, and classed outcomes that the policies (re)produce (Anderson 2013). This workshop thus aims to bridge these strands of research and foster a conceptual and empirical reflect on the various ways in which these state practices and processes of marginalization manifest, the logics driving them, including the construction of the citizen and its ‘other’ (Anderson, 2013), and how they are negotiated and contested by those targeted. The event thus aims to foster a critical discussion on how to study multiple inequalities (Crenshaw, 2012) and addresses how marginality and banishment are used as means of governing social inequality. in terms of austerity. It invites participants to reflect on intersections of exclusion and rights differentiation in policy and practice, and in doing so, enhances interdisciplinary exchange on an urgent issue for social sciences and public policy.

The workshop interrogates the interface between different kinds of banishment, understood as government policies of spatial and social regulation targeting citizens as well as non-citizens. As highlighted by Beckett and Herbert (2010, 1), governments have historically relied on spatial strategies including ‘banishment, quarantine, transportation, deportation and incarceration’ of those perceived as deviant, criminal, or a social, political or demographic ‘threat’ to the state and society. Research on contemporary practices of banishment have highlighted the return of banishment as a government strategy to regulate social inequality, notably through practices of containment and expulsion: incarceration and segregation are utilized to govern social marginalization, destitution, and resulting urban unrest (Fassin, 2013; Wacquant, 2009), and private security personnel and hostile architecture is deployed to exclude the ‘socially undesirable’ from commercial and public spaces, notably in the U.S. and in Western Europe (Petty, 2016). Moreover, confinement and deportation are used to govern ‘unwanted’ mobility and inequalities on a global scale, and most expulsions take place from richer to poorer countries (Besteman, 2019; Khosravi, 2019). The same body of research has identified racialized, neoliberal and securitized logics underpinning these different state projects; yet rarely have the policies designed to address ‘unwanted’ international migration, urban securitization and social inequality been addressed together.
                      This workshop aims to explore this gap by engaging conceptually and empirically with how practices ofbanishment among citizens and non-citizens is used to govern social inequality. In doing so, we aim to overcome the ‘migrant-citizen divide’ (Anderson, 2013; Dahinden, 2016) and address intersections and commonalities in how laws and policies of confinement, socio-spatial segregation and expulsion affect different marginalised groups and constrains and stratifies their access to rights (Korteweg, 2017; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). We invite scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, sociology, geography, law, public administration and related fields, to submit conceptual as well as empirical contributions that explore different policies, practices and logics of banishment. The themes we are interested in exploring include, but not limited to, the following:
 
-       Conceptual and theoretical engagements with banishment as a form of social and spatial regulation, including its underpinning logics of neoliberalism, security and social control;
-       The role of banishment in perpetuating racialized, gendered and classed inequalities and reconfiguring the boundaries of citizenship;
-       Historical studies tracing the emergence and shifting configurations of forms of banishment over time;
-       Empirical studies of laws and policies as well as ethnographic explorations of how banishment is translated into practice (e.g. studies of street level bureaucrats involved in policing, imprisonment, deportation proceedings or working within social services);
-       Engagements with the perspectives of target groups (e.g. people detained and imprisoned, deported or evicted)
-       Novel solidarities and practices of citizenship emerging among those banished (e.g. among deportees, among destitute and marginalized citizens and non-citizens)

Banishment, which denotes the social and spatial regulation of ‘undesired’ populations (Beckett & Herbert, 2010), is an old governing technique that has seen a resurge in recent years. Today, we can witness practices of banishment used as a means of governing social inequality (Wacquant 2009), through the exclusion or confinement of ‘deviant’ citizens and non-citizens (Jefferson, Turner, & Jensen, 2019) and in the creation of ‘hostile’ environments in urban areas or in refugee camps (Petty, 2019; Suárez-Krabbe & Lindberg, 2019), and in practices of expulsion, designed to regulate the mobility of undesired migrants (Khosravi, 2019). Banishment targets citizens and non-citizens, yet commonalities are usually overlooked and treated as separate phenomena in policy and in research; the aim of this workshop is to bridge this ‘migrant-citizen divide’ (Anderson, 2013). In order to do so, we invite an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on commonalities in policy regimes aimed at socially and territorially banishing ‘undesired’ populations. The workshop invites empirical as well as theoretical contributions exploring policies, practices and experiences of banishment and their effects from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 2012) that includes gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality – and legal status. Moreover, we are interested in the productive nature of banishment in constituting boundaries between the ‘citizen’ and ‘others’, and in the ways in which these boundaries are challenged by those targeted by exclusionary policies. The workshop thus aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary exchange between participants working on these on acute matters of social inequality and exclusion. It will result in a joint academic publication project and we also intend to write a summary report, available to the general public.

Lisa Marie Borrelli works as a postdoctoral researcher at the HES-SO Valais and the University of Neuchâtel within the nccr -> on the move project ‘Governing Migration and Social Cohesion through Integration Requirements’, led by Christin Achermann and Stefanie Kurt. She recently published a collaboratively written legal ethnography entitled Migrants before the law: Contested Migration Control in Europe, co-authored with Tobias Eule, Annika Lindberg and Anna Wyss and published by Palgrave in 2019. Her research interests include organizational sociology and ethnography, public administration, social and welfare policy, as well as critical research on bordering, exclusion and discrimination (see her recent publication entitled ‘The Border Inside – Organizational Socialization of Street-level Bureaucrats in the European Migration Regime’ published in the Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2019). This is reflected in her previous work on ambivalent laws and emotions of street-level bureaucrats working on irregular migration in the Schengen Area, discussed in ‘Whisper down, up and between the lanes – Exclusionary policies and their limits of control in times of irregularized migration’, published 2018 by Public Administration, and the co-authored article with Annika Lindberg on ‘The Creativity of Coping: Alternative Tales of Moral Dilemmas among Migration Control Officers’, published in the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2018.
 
Annika Lindberg works as a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, University of Bern. Her research interests include theories of statehood and street level bureaucracy, migration and border studies, deportation studies, social policy, and ethnographic research methods. She concluded her doctoral research project, Governing the Deportation Limbo: State Responses to Rejected Asylum-seekers in Denmark and Sweden’ in 2019. Her postdoctoral project, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, explores the Danish ‘ghetto laws’. Aside from the collaborative book project on states’ control of irregularized migrants (see Eule, Borrelli, Lindberg and Wyss 2019), she has co-authored the public report Stop Killing us Slowly: A research report on the criminalization of rejected asylum seekers in Denmark (Suárez-Krabbe, Lindberg and Arce 2018) and “Enforcing Apartheid? The Politics of ‘Intolerability’ in the Danish Migration and Integration Regimes” (Suárez-Krabbe and Lindberg 2019) on the spatial regulation of racialized ‘others’ in Denmark. She has further written on ethnographic research methodology (Lindberg and Borrelli, 2019, “Let the right one in? On European migration authorities’ resistance to research”, published in Social Anthropology) and border studies (see for instance Lindberg and Borrelli, 2019, “All quiet on the Eastern Front? Controlling transit migration in Latvia and Lithuania”, published with the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.