This project focuses on African migrants seeking political asylum in the urban Midwest as they navigate the complex politico-legal landscape of contemporary U.S. migration policies. Specifically, the research investigates how the process of seeking asylum contributes to the shaping of migrants? subjectivities by examining: a) the various discourses and resources that institutional bodies (immigration officials or non-governmental organization workers) draw upon to render the asylum seeker a knowable and manageable object, and b) the ways in which asylum seekers negotiate these institutionally-produced forms of subjectivity, at turns adopting, resisting, or transforming them. The tension between the discourses of human rights (and, increasingly, of trauma), on the one hand, and the discourses of national security, on the other, is especially palpable in a post-9/11 U.S., as recent legal and political measures have made asylum seeking an increasingly onerous process. Data collection includes semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and participant observation, and will occur both in institutional settings (among immigration officials, NGO workers) and within the everyday social worlds of asylum seekers. Data collected among institutional bodies will elicit information on how asylum seekers are constructed as ?deserving? (or not) of legal status, and how transnational discourses of human rights, trauma, and national security are negotiated by those who enact migration law. Data collected among asylum seekers will provide insight into how migrants agentively respond to the social and political categories imposed on them via legal and institutional bodies, as well as how asylum seekers both shape and are shaped by the legal processes in which they are embedded. This project contends that the current historical moment provides a unique opportunity to examine the lived consequences (both intended and unintended) of immigration laws and practices. The study also aims to elucidate how different actors, within the same context, make law meaningful in disparate ways. Finally, the research seeks to address the paucity of ethnographic work within refugee studies more broadly.
