Over the last ten years, Greece has become a destination for widespread labor and asylum related immigrations. This has made Greece a crucial de facto frontier of the European Union and has dramatically transformed Greek conceptions and practices around asylum and citizenship. Graduate student Heath Cabot, supervised by Dr. Donald L. Brenneis, will undertake ethnographic research at an asylum-advocacy NGO in Athens, to examine how Greek advocacy lawyers and asylum seekers co-produce the legal categories through which asylum and citizenship take shape. This research also explores how multiple and frequently conflicting legal repertoires, including the Greek State, the UN, and the EU, overlap and are reconstituted through the advocacy process.
The researcher will employ multiple ethnographic research methods, including the observation of NGO bureaucratic procedures, the collection of life histories from asylum seekers, and the mapping of asylum seekers' communities and social networks. By providing a detailed account of the everyday politics of asylum advocacy at this particular NGO, this project will shed light on how NGOs implement and refigure asylum policy. Additionally, this work will serve as an important qualitative complement to the official data most often enlisted in the construction of immigration and asylum policy.
