Migration and Racial Capitalism

Description

(Dr.) Sarah Philipson Isaac will be presenting on the everyday intricacies of migration bureaucracy and its consequences through the frame of racial capitalism. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data with officers at the Swedish Migration Agency and people seeking asylum in post-2015 Sweden, Philipson Isaac discusses the temporal dimensions of dispossession enacted by the Migration Agency’s New Public Management (NPM asylum application assessments. Using racial capitalism as an analytic lens, she argues that temporal dispossession functions through processes of differentiation and racial devaluation central to the distribution of life chances within the Nordic welfare state. Temporal dispossession use temporal means of discarding asylum seekers’ need for protection; thereby, preventing those seeking asylum from making progress in their applications. This process relegates asylum seekers to a pace of time distinct from the surrounding society, effectively positioning them as untrustworthy and undeserving subjects. This seminar will show how temporal dispossession, enacted within the asylum application procedure, is enforced deceleration of time while interrupted by pockets of acceleration. In doing so, Philipson Isaac highlights the political economy of migration in the Nordic context, and the welfare state’s role in remaking racial capitalism.

Period	24 Sept 2024
Event type	Workshop
Location	Turku, FinlandShow on map