Please join us for this seminar, with guest speakers, Thom Tyerman, Melanie Griffiths and Robert Bircumshaw, followed by lunch afterwards. This is a hybrid event. Please RSVP your in-person or remote attendance here.

Despite their centrality, the emotional dimensions of immigration work remain hidden. This seminar brings together practitioners, activists and academics to discuss the place of emotions and emotional labour in both bordering and unbordering, that is their capacity to reinforce and disrupt immigration regimes.

Speakers:

Melanie Griffiths is a social scientist at Birmingham University.

Emotional Economies of Immigration Work

Despite the prevailing construction of bureaucracies as 'rational', immigration administration is deeply affective. This talk considers the emotional economy of the UK immigration system, including the ways legal detention, and Home Office practitioners read, evaluate, provoke, prohibit, and employ emotion. It argues that four emotions dominate across the breadth and scales of the immigration system, alongside a chilling disinterest and denial of emotion.

Thom Tyerman is a Research Fellow and the University of Edinburugh.

This intervention focuses on the role of love in everyday migrant solidarity work. Following Pin-Fat (2019), I understand love not as an 'internal' feeling, but rather an acknowledgement of the radical relationality of our shared humanity. In this sense, love is a refusal of the sovereign fantasies of inside/outside, self/other, security, and invulnerability that seduce much of our politics and perpetually produce the epistemic anxieties and material violences of UK bordering. Drawing on 10 years of research and involvement in migrant solidarity work in the UK and Calais, I show how love as a radical everyday human relationality can be found in practices of monitoring police violence, co-inhabiting squats, and detention visiting that both resist border violences and prefigure alternative worlds.

Robert Bircumshaw is the head of Immigration and Asylum at the Central England Law Centre.

Robert is the head of the Immigration and Asylum team at Central England Law Centre. He has worked as a solicitor for over 20 years and has previously taught and provided training nationally on immigration law. He works closely with the university, in particular with Warwick Linc, providing law students with first-hand experience of working with clients at the Law Centre. He was recently awarded an honorary associate professorship by Warick University for his work over the years with many students, trying to divert them into a career in social welfare law!

Robert will talk, as a non-academic lawyer, about his experience as a solicitor specialising in the immigration field for far too long. He will consider the emotional demands on practice, reflecting on how he approaches his contact with clients and manages the emotional side of his work, thinking about burn out, vicarious trauma and the difficulties of maintaining a work/life balance.