In recent years, successive migration “crises” have propelled borders to the center of media attention, political debate, and collective moral imaginaries. At the same time, the criminalization of migration has become increasingly integrated through practices of border externalization, the modular adaptations of surveillance regimes, and the systematic persecution of border-crossing.

Bringing together international scholars and activists, this one-day conference will unearth not only the connections between national and transnational practices for governing mobility, but also how international frameworks for criminalizing migration become entangled with local disciplinary regimes, moral idioms, and political interests. How does the penal regime of the border borrow from criminological paradigms used to prosecute the Mafia, terrorism, and organized subversion? What moral, political, and religious frameworks do states use to criminalize migration, including through the appropriation and manipulation of border death? How do migrants, smugglers, and humanitarians resist or subvert those frameworks, mobilizing their own interpretation of borders and their discontents?

photo © Max Hirzel

Full program schedule available here.