Alison Mountz
Laurier Research Chair in Global Migration, Wilfrid Laurier University
February 3, 2023
This lecture begins by explaining shifts in geographies of asylum-seeking that have transpired in recent decades, including shifting border enforcement that curtails access to protection. People are travelling great distances, crossing multiple borders, and encountering proliferating forms of enforcement and stasis along the way, as they navigate border externalization; detention on islands; and racialized practices, policies, and geographies of exclusion. Researchers and activists have mapped these shifts, arguing that they amount to the erasure and death of people seeking asylum or the death of asylum itself. As more 'durable' solutions recede, more informal arrangements take hold in the restructuring of international protection. How do these particular geographical arrangements extend colonial histories and capitalize on militarized landscapes? And what are we left with at the confluence of historically high rates of displacement and the erosion of access to protection? What is the afterlife of state protection itself, and what roles are Canada and the United States playing? This talk explores new policy experiments and their intimate geopolitics, contending with what lies beyond asylum's afterlives.