In contemporary society, passport checks at nation-state borders are accepted. But what if these checks were happening in our own home? Rachel Humphris presents the first intimate ethnography of these governing encounters in homes between Romanian Roma migrants and UK frontline workers including social workers, teachers, health visitors, NGO outreach workers and volunteers. Focusing on how the nation-state is reproduced within the home, the presentation considers what it is like to have your legal status, your right to ‘belong’, judged from your everyday domestic life. This presentation considers the divide between state and family, public and private, home-land and home and what these dichotomies mean in an era of hostility.
Dr Rachel Humphris (@rachel_humphris) is a Lecturer of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow. She is also a researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford and the UK Coordinator of the European Commission’s European Website on Integration. Since completing her DPhil at the University of Oxford, she was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnicity and Diversity and will hold visiting fellowships at University of California at Berkeley, USA; York University, Toronto; and University of Sheffield, UK. Rachel is a political anthropologist working at the intersection between migration, globalisation and urbanisation to understand social inequalities. Her research programme is methodologically diverse, theoretically grounded and empirically driven. Motivated by and responsive to real world policy problems she employs qualitative analysis in research that engages theories and debates in social policy, critical urbanism and migration studies. Much of her work is inherently interdisciplinary, cutting across research in anthropology, public policy, geography, politics and sociology. Her published research can be found in Geopolitics, the Sociological Review, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social Identities and Critical Public Health, among others. Her monograph based on her DPhil anthropological research with Romanian Roma migrant mothers in the ‘downscaled’ urban context of Luton, will be published with University of Bristol Press in March 2019.
Akaterina Glyniadaki is a PhD candidate at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science.