PhD Thesis defence by Maxine Both
Immigration detention centers have proliferated both within and beyond state borders, as governments increasingly detain migrants to identify and remove those deemed illegal . As these policies intensify across space, local communities encounter immigration detention more closely, at times standing in solidarity with people detained. As relations of support develop across walls, this solidarity complicates the socio-spatial separation between inside and outside. Yet, existing understandings of borders and cross-border processes in international politics— premised on clear inside-outside divisions—remain limited in understanding these in-between spaces and relations. How might we theorize borders and cross-border dynamics together to better understand immigration detention and solidarity?
To answer this question, I bring together existing understandings of borders and the transnational from international relations as well as critical migration and border studies by thinking with liminality. I propose the transborder as a framework to theorize the in-between space, practices, and subjectivities of immigration detention and solidarity. Arguing that bordering processes do not always clearly distinguish between the inside and the outside but rather produce in-betweenness, this thesis reveals overlooked spaces, actors, and practices in our changing border reality. It is based on eleven months of field research in Canada and Italy (2023-2024) with support actors including activists, lawyers, politicians, NGOs, health care professionals, detention center workers, and family members as well as people previously detained. Studying how immigration detention is experienced and contested by communities, I conducted a comparative political ethnography in two field sites: an Immigration Holding Center (IHC) in Canada and a Centro di Permanenza per il Rimpatrio (CPR) in Italy. In each, I participated in activists’ support activities, accompanied lawyers to immigration detention hearings, carried out interviews and relational mapping, and collected documents.
Throughout the chapters, I compare solidarity in response to immigration detention in contrasting contexts (Canada and Italy), theorizing transborder space, practices, and subjectivities across diverse actors and institutional settings. First, in contrast to clear bordering divisions, I show how immigration detention centers produce liminality as a transborder space displaying a lack of control, improvisation, and temporal suspension. Second, I uncover how support actors develop transborder practices to challenge immigration detention, by bridging and delegitimizing bordering divisions. Third, I explore how encounters with these spaces and practices disrupt, intensify, and blur subjectivities across socio-spatial dimensions. Lastly, I reflect on how the transborder might display a permanence, reinforcement, or a transformation.
Maxine Both (she/her) is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute. Her research studies responses of solidarity to border control, specifically, immigration detention systems in Canada and Italy. Reconsidering existing understandings of borders and cross-border movement within global politics, Maxine theorizes how borders within and outside of state lines become contested, suspended, and transformed within society. Furthermore, she is interested in interpretive methodologies, the ethics of field research and collaboration, and creative approaches to studying the intersection of the social and the spatial. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as the Fonds de Recherche du Québec. Before joining the EUI, Maxine completed her bachelor's and master's degrees at McGill University (Canada) and worked for Employment and Social Development Canada. She has held visiting scholar positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Zürich, the University of Montréal, the University of Milan, and worked as a Research Assistant for the Migration Policy Center (EUI).
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