By detailing the making of and social life of Nauru’s asylum system, Dr. Julia Morris shows the institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the governance of migration around the world. As similar practices of offshoring and outsourcing asylum have become popular worldwide, they are enabled by the mobile labor and expertise of transnational refugee industry workers who carry out the necessary daily operations.
Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru goes behind the scenes to shed light on the everyday running of the offshore asylum industry in Nauru and uncover what really happens underneath the headlines. Morris illuminates how refugee rights activism and #RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of suffering.
The Zolberg Institute welcomes Dr. Julia Morris to present her new book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru. Welcome remarks and Q&A by Professor of Politics, Victoria Hattam.
This webinar will examine the Biden policies and current court cases challenging Title 42 expulsions. We will hear from experts on why and how the right to asylum should be restored at the US southwest border.
Dr. Julia C. Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She holds a doctoral degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. She is a political anthropologist and migration studies scholar whose research focuses on forced migration, borders, and the environment. Her work looks at the political economy of migration, including the forms of financial and geopolitical value that revolve around the commodification of human mobility. She has published widely including in Global Networks, The Extractive Industries and Society, Journal of Refugee Studies, Forced Migration Review, and with Routledge publication house on immigration and border control and global knowledge networks. Her book is forthcoming with Cornell University Press on the consequential damages of phosphate and refugee processing in the Republic of Nauru in the Pacific.
Previously, she was also a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, as well as a research student at Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS).
Victoria Hattam is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT. Hattam works in three research areas: US-Mexico border politics, design and production in the global economy, and visual and spatial politics. She is a member of the Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster. In 2018-19, Hattam co-directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities with Miriam Ticktin, Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, and Alex Aleinikoff. In 2020-21, Hattam will be a faculty fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.