Description:

This is the first of three spring events featuring theoretical and research findings of the Deportation Research Clinic, a project of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.

On May 5 at noon, Professor Jacqueline Stevens will describe the challenges citizens in the United States and globally face due to citizenship's evidentiary requirements. Drawing on earlier research on the government operations that render de jure citizens de facto stateless, this talk will explain how these apparent failures of documentation require reconceptualizing citizenship's core meanings.  Stevens offers a deconstructive reading of citizenship as a written (re)production of a putatively original signature and event. Using insights from Jacques Derrida and Veena Das, Stevens theorizes narratives of citizenship's evidentiary failures as apologues, that is, moralizing fables whose primary effect is affirmation of sovereign authority. 

Stevens is the author most recently of States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia University Press, 2009) and co-editor with Benjamin Lawrance of Citizenship In Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press, 2016, forthcoming).

A light lunch will be served

The following week (Thursday, May 12) the Deportation Research Clinic will host a noon meeting for faculty and graduate students currently working on deportation at Northwestern.  Our final meeting in June will review the Clinic's litigation and research project for the year, and offer training in requesting documents under the Freedom of Information Act.