scholarly journals Seeking Status, Forging Refuge: U.S. War Resister Migrations to Canada

Refuge ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-107
Author(s):  
Alison Mountz

Often people migrate through interstitial zones and categories between state territories, policies, or designations like “immigrant” or “refugee.” Where there is no formal protection or legal status, people seek, forge, and find safe haven in other ways, by other means, and by necessity. In this article, I argue that U.S. war resisters to Canada forged safe haven through broadly based social movements. I develop this argument through examination of U.S. war-resister histories, focusing on two generations: U.S. citizens who came during the U.S.-led wars in Vietnam and, more recently, Afghanistan and Iraq. Resisters and activists forged refuge through alternative paths to protection, including the creation of shelter, the pursuit of time-space trajectories that carried people away from war and militarism, the formation of social movements across the Canada-U.S. border, and legal challenges to state policies and practices.

Author(s):  
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann

In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. This book sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. The book shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. This book rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the “underclass” could be managed only through coercion and force. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, the book offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Bennett

Cannabis (marijuana) is the most commonly consumed, universally produced, and frequently trafficked psychoactive substance prohibited under international drug control laws. Yet, several countries have recently moved toward legalization. In these places, the legal status of cannabis is complex, especially because illegal markets persist. This chapter explores the ways in which a sector’s legal status interacts with political consumerism. The analysis draws on a case study of political consumerism in the US and Canadian cannabis markets over the past two decades as both countries moved toward legalization. It finds that the goals, tactics, and leadership of political consumerism activities changed as the sector’s legal status shifted. Thus prohibition, semilegalization, and new legality may present special challenges to political consumerism, such as silencing producers, confusing consumers, deterring social movements, and discouraging discourse about ethical issues. The chapter concludes that political consumerism and legal status may have deep import for one another.


2019 ◽  
Vol 220 ◽  
pp. 49-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Van Natta ◽  
Nancy J. Burke ◽  
Irene H. Yen ◽  
Mark D. Fleming ◽  
Christoph L. Hanssmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Quisumbing King

A perennial question in the scholarship of the state asks how states rule and expand their capacity to do so. Scholars have paid special attention to activities that rationalize and build administrative capacity, known as legibility projects. Alongside these projects, state actors also rule through ambiguous and unclear techniques that have been given less scholarly attention. I introduce the concept of institutionalized ambiguity in legal status to extend the study of state rule. I ask what generates ambiguity, what purposes it serves in law and policy, and what consequences it has for the management of populations. I propose an analytic approach that draws attention to equivocation in law as enabling classificatory debates and discretion in the political realm. To illustrate the purchase of institutionalized ambiguity in legal status, I analyze how, during the years of formal imperial rule (1898-1946), U.S. state actors debated the racial fitness and membership of Filipinos in the imagined U.S. nation. I consider the broader implications of this analysis for scholars of modern state formation and suggest that foundational conflicts over national identity can be institutionalized in law, in turn facilitating a range of contradictory, but co-existing, legally defensible policies.


Author(s):  
Jimmy Patiño

Chapter 6 explores how Herman Baca and San Diego Chicano/Mexicano created the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR) in 1976. These activists fought the San Diego Sherriff’s Department issued order for taxi cab drivers, under penalty of citation and fines, to report any of their clientele who they “feel” might be undocumented to their offices for apprehension in 1972. The San Diego Police Department, under the administration of San Diego Mayor (and future California governor) Pete Wilson, followed suit in 1973 by assuming the responsibility of determining resident’s legal status and apprehending the undocumented to assist the U.S. Border Patrol. This culminated in the founding of the CCR through the struggle on behalf of the family of a Puerto Rican barrio youth, Luis “Tato” Rivera, killed by a National City police officer.


Author(s):  
Todd R. Burton

Potential leaders within marginalized communities find it difficult to connect, learn, strategize, and support one another and build a cohesive community capable of effecting social change. This research contributes to filling a gap in empirical research on effective approaches to employing social media tools to organize and engage in social movements. The research builds on earlier studies of marginalized communities and social media to organize and engages in social movements by applying a case study design to assess how the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) military community employed social media to organize and advocate for inclusion and end discrimination within the U.S. armed forces. Seventeen findings were identified that describe key ways the LGBT military community employed these tools to organize, identify leaders and their roles, and how online behavior affected offline advocacy.


Author(s):  
Erin O’Rourke ◽  
Kim Potowski

AbstractWork on Spanish in the U.S. has increasingly examined the results of dialect contact. This paper analyzes realizations of syllable-final /s/ and word and syllable-initial /r̄/ in naturalistic interviews among 88 individuals in Chicago belonging to three generations of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and two generations of “MexiRicans.” It explores: (1) whether realizations change depending on the dialect of the interviewer – that is, whether accommodation is taking place; (2) if there is change across generations; (3) in the case of MexiRicans, whether individuals’ realizations align with the mother’s ethnolinguistic group. Results show that Mexicans’ phonological behavior did not vary for /s/ or /r̄/ according to interlocutor, while Puerto Ricans used velarized /r̄/ more frequently with other Puerto Ricans at a rate approaching significance. Significant differences were also found between generations in several cases but not for mother’s ethnolinguistic group; the interaction of generation and interlocutor showed significance in some cases. We also observed a correspondence between the use of a weakened /s/ and velarized /r̄/, although there was considerable variation among individual speakers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Goldenberg ◽  
Sari L. Reisner ◽  
Gary W. Harper ◽  
Kristi E. Gamarel ◽  
Rob Stephenson

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