Seminar: Deportability and the family

Open seminar on Friday, 17.11.2023, Migration Institute of Finland (Turku) and online

UPDATED PROGRAM (All times are EET)

10.00-10.15: Morning coffee (on site)

10.15-10.30: Welcome and introduction

(Saara Pellander, Director of the Migration Institute of Finland, PI of the INDEFI project)

10.30-11.15: Keynote 1 (bio below)

Kept Apart: temporality, migrantisation and family separation in the UK family immigration system (Katharine Charsley, Professor of Migration Studies in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol)

11.15-12.00: Keynote 2 (abstract and bio below)

‘Deporting daddy’: Mixed-citizenship families and immigration enforcement in the UK (Melanie Griffiths, Associate Professor, University of Birmingham)

12.00-13.30: Lunch break (at your own expense)

13.30-15.00: Intimate geographies of bordering: Deportability and its effects on Finnish citizens with foreign spouses and their extended families (Research Council of Finland, 2021-2025)

Introduction to the project (PI Saara Pellander & Jaana Palander)

“[Deportation] is such a shocking word that I do not even want to say it aloud!”: Finnish citizens’ ‘experiential migratisation’ in the face of their foreign spouse’s deportability (Eveliina Lyytinen)

“Just the two of us against the Finnish system”: Mixed-citizen families’ strategies of survival and resistance under the threat of deportation (Pihla Siim & Eveliina Lyytinen)

Commentary by Tanja Del Angel, Familia ry.

15.00-15.30: Coffee

Registration

Please register here by November 15

A participation link to the Zoom will be emailed before the webinar.

For more information: eveliina.lyytinen(at)migrationinstitute.fi

KEYNOTE 1:

Prof. Katharine Charsley: Kept Apart: temporality, migrantisation and family separation in the UK family immigration system

Bio: Katharine Charsley is Professor of Migration Studies in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her interests lie in family and migration, particularly transnational/bi-national relationships and their regulation. She is currently PI on the 'Brexit Couples: UK-EU couples after Brexit' project (ESRC funded, 2023-2026) charting the impact of migrantisation on such couples who, since Brexit and the end of Free Movement, now have to navigate the UK immigration system if they wish to live together in the UK. 

Keynote 2:

‘Deporting daddy’: Mixed-citizenship families and immigration enforcement in the UK

Abstract: This talk draws on an ESRC-funded qualitative project into the lived realities of UK-based families affected by one member’s immigration status insecurity. Following 30 mixed-citizenship families (consisting of British citizens and foreign national men), the project explored the impact of one member’s precarious or illegalised immigration status on the family unit, including the threat or reality of immigration enforcement such as immigration detention and deportation. It draws on interviews with the couples, as well as practitioners from the state, legal, and third sectors, and observation of deportation appeals. The talk explores the harm (often wide-ranging, extreme, and chronic), that immigration enforcement causes to the whole family – including those who are not themselves subject to UK immigration rules. It will focus particularly on some of the many ways British children are affected by a father’s precarious immigration status, including the impacts on their own sense of belonging and identity in the UK.

Bio: Melanie Griffiths is a cross-disciplinary social scientist working on migration and immigration enforcement in the UK. She holds an Associate Professorship at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Before joining Birmingham in 2018, she led an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant at the University of Bristol. In 2013 she worked as a research assistant on a University of Exeter project on asylum appeals. She has a DPhil from COMPAS at the University of Oxford.