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Congratulations to Paloma E. Villegas who recently defended her doctoral dissertation in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her thesis is titled Assembling and re(making) migrant illegalization: Mexican migrants with precarious status in Canada.
Paloma's research project investigates how migrant illegalization is produced and experienced by Mexican precarious status migrants in Toronto, Canada. Migrant illegalization refers to the ways in which migrants are produced as "illegal" through legal, social and discursive means.
Paloma's analysis draws on a framework of assemblages: ensembles of multiple and dispersed, though interrelated, actors, processes and forces, interacting at different spatial and temporal scales. This framework allows her to link different modes of analysis (the global, transnational, national and local) to historical and contemporary processes. It also allows her to focus on structural, discursive and affective responses to such processes.
The dissertation has three sections. The first is a substantive engagement with the theoretical, methodological and ethical issues that emerge when analyzing migrant illegalization. The second section involves an analysis of the transnational production of migrant illegalization by tracking two types of trajectories: the spatial trajectories of migrants and the discursive trajectories of ideas about illegalized migrants. Finally, the third section examines respondents' status trajectories once in Canada. She pays attention to two processes: a context of contracting immigration policy and borders and the breath of surveillance mechanisms that illegalize migrants.
Paloma proposes that illegalization is a relational and interscalar process that produces a web of differently situated migrants (with or without work permits, with or without entry visas, with or without access to social entitlements). One way we can track the interlocking of such different status trajectories through an analysis of marks and remarks. Marks appear in writing (such as policy documents, immigration applications and warrants, identification papers) on bodies (including clothing and physical features) and demarcate physical and ideological borders. Remarks, such as those in immigration proceedings, media articles and from politicians also affect the ways in which migrant illegalization is experienced and understood. The thesis also makes a methodological and ethical intervention on what it means to work with migrants with different statuses and the limits to those engagements.
Paloma's research project investigates how migrant illegalization is produced and experienced by Mexican precarious status migrants in Toronto, Canada. Migrant illegalization refers to the ways in which migrants are produced as "illegal" through legal, social and discursive means.
Paloma's analysis draws on a framework of assemblages: ensembles of multiple and dispersed, though interrelated, actors, processes and forces, interacting at different spatial and temporal scales. This framework allows her to link different modes of analysis (the global, transnational, national and local) to historical and contemporary processes. It also allows her to focus on structural, discursive and affective responses to such processes.
The dissertation has three sections. The first is a substantive engagement with the theoretical, methodological and ethical issues that emerge when analyzing migrant illegalization. The second section involves an analysis of the transnational production of migrant illegalization by tracking two types of trajectories: the spatial trajectories of migrants and the discursive trajectories of ideas about illegalized migrants. Finally, the third section examines respondents' status trajectories once in Canada. She pays attention to two processes: a context of contracting immigration policy and borders and the breath of surveillance mechanisms that illegalize migrants.
Paloma proposes that illegalization is a relational and interscalar process that produces a web of differently situated migrants (with or without work permits, with or without entry visas, with or without access to social entitlements). One way we can track the interlocking of such different status trajectories through an analysis of marks and remarks. Marks appear in writing (such as policy documents, immigration applications and warrants, identification papers) on bodies (including clothing and physical features) and demarcate physical and ideological borders. Remarks, such as those in immigration proceedings, media articles and from politicians also affect the ways in which migrant illegalization is experienced and understood. The thesis also makes a methodological and ethical intervention on what it means to work with migrants with different statuses and the limits to those engagements.