Description
Abstract: This presentation will be of a chapter within the PhD project.
This interdisciplinary project uses postcolonial feminist critiques and a particular case study of women who have ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) in the U.K. to explore how the state interacts with migrant women. This project gathers rich data to center migrant women’s voices and explore how their identities are constructed by the state and how they resist and reclaim (Krishnadas, 2007) their multi-layered positions and identities. The project combines postcolonial legal methodology (Roy, 2008, p. 319) with empirical research in local partner agency Staffordshire North and Stoke-on-Trent Citizens Advice (SNSCA) to address the research aims. I am a volunteer and research assistant within SNSCA. The empirical part of this PhD gathers data using a combination of qualitative research methods including ethnography, participant action research, narrative interviews with migrant women as well as semi-structured interviews with staff at SNSCA. ‘NRPF’ is part of processes policing migrant women’s bodies, which I situate within a postcolonial critical framework to argue that the State ‘others’ these women, using bureaucratic systems, to keep them subjects of oppression in a form of ongoing modern-day colonialism. The research unpacks the State’s regime of mobility and hopes to assist SNSCA to lobby for policy changes. It will explore multi-layered power structures using critical analysis provided from postcolonial feminist approaches. Exploring everyday bureaucracy helps demonstrate how exclusion of subjects like migrants or ‘non-citizens’ works to contest an image of a congruent state (Mandelbaum, 2016, p. 188). By labelling migrant women with immigration statuses that include NRPF, the U.K. creates discourses where these women are not worthy of basic state assistance.
[1] “mundane manifestations of state processes” is a quote from a paper by Tawil-Souri and is discussed in more detail further in the report (Tawil-Souri, 2011).
