CRS Seminar: Peter Nyers, Omer Ozcan, The Graduate Sociology Workshop

The Graduate Sociology Workshop
– Presents –
Peter Nyers
Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation
Omer Ozcan
Enforced Disappearance: A Stretched-out Present and Unending Grief
January 14, 2019 | 11:30 AM – 2:20 PM | Kaneff Tower 519
Co-sponsored by the Centre for Refugee Studies, Department of Sociology, Centre for Public Sociology, Department of Anthropology and Graduate Program in Sociology.
Peter Nyers is a University Scholar and Associate Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.
The talk is based on Nyers’ recent book, which brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. Rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship, Immigration and Deportation looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of ‘regular’ citizens into deportable ‘irregular’ citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. This includes unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, as well as through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment.
Omer Ozcan is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Centre for Refugee Studies at York University.
This talk concerns the practices of waiting that occur when people are placed outside of the protection of the law. I trace life stories of Halit and Eyşan, a displaced elderly Kurdish couple, to discuss how the counterinsurgency practice of enforced disappearance, a distinct exercise of sovereign power, produces a specific form of waiting, which I call enforced waiting. I examine temporal effects of the prolonged armed conflict between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on everyday life in Yuksekova where violence is not always instantaneous or spectacular but often gradual and uneventful. I argue that waiting in Kurdistan is intrinsic to sovereign practices and it is the embodiment of continuous and uneventful violence that suffuses across time and space.