Cfp: (Re)producing Insecurities: University of Sheffield, Friday 29 September 2017

The recent EU referendum campaign and resultant vote for the UK to leave the EU is creating new insecurities for EU citizens within and prospective migrants to the UK. At the same time, the European refugee ‘crisis’ was mobilised as a source of fear, insecurity and threat to the UK electorate by the Leave side in the referendum campaign. A collision of fears around intra EU mobility and refugee crisis was manufactured as a central feature of the Brexit vote. Central to such mobilisations are of course the reproduction of older legacies of inequality, precarity as well as white privilege, racism and colonial constructions of self and other. This workshop aims to address this duality within the new politics of insecurity in Europe: the (re)production of new forms of insecurity for migrants and their families, and the mobilisation of migration as an insecurity for resident populations. Here (re)production draws attention to the intimate connectivities of multiple ‘crises’ and the material, intimate, embodied sites and processes through which ‘new’ insecurities are (re)produced.

We particularly invite papers which connect fear of migrants with migrants’ fears.  We also encourage consideration of the multiple scales and temporalities through which insecurity is felt, understood, managed, manipulated and ultimately (re)produced: through intimate relationships, within and outside ‘family’ groupings, across and within forms of affiliation, wider social institutions and trans/national polities. Papers are welcomed addressing (but not limited to) the following questions:

• How are connections between the consequences of the Brexit vote and the migrant ‘crisis’ reproducing (in)securities?
• How are migration insecurities mobilised politically across Europe?
• What evidence, if any, exists that migration contributes to rising economic and social insecurities of citizens in receiving societies in terms of e.g. labour markets, housing and welfare?
• How might experiences of precarity across groups posited as ‘us’ or ‘them’ be connected?
• How are insecurities processed, mediated or challenged through intimate relations?
• How do precarious migrants and their families plan future lives amid ‘crisis’?
• What practices of in/visibility are employed in the micro-politics of everyday encounters by EU nationals in response to fears?
• What research methods and approaches capture crisis, emotion, intention and temporality of (re)producing insecurities?
• How do we move forward as a society from these insecurities?

We invite paper proposals (abstracts of 200 words) addressing these and related questions from a theoretical, empirical, activist and/or normative perspective.

The workshop is particularly interested in papers that examine the social, political and ethical dynamics of (re)producing insecurities for (and about) mobile subjects within the contemporary ‘crisis’.

Please send abstracts to Hannah Lewis (h.j.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk) by  1 August 2017.