ABOUT

My work focuses on the intersections of ethics and politics in international and US legal frameworks involving migration and citizenship. I examine how negotiations of deservingness intersect with constructions of race, gender, religion, class, and state borders to justify hierarchies, exclusions, and injustices through law.  It also points towards the need to reconceptualize political responsibility in global politics, especially taking into consideration displacement related to climate change.

My current research project explores the ethics involved in crafting legal categories in the margins of citizenship. I ask how deservingness has been enmeshed in the processes of creating and reforming law for non-citizens. I argue that notions of deservingness incentivize rights claimants to take personal and individual responsibility for structural inequality and injustice, reinforcing narrow narratives on rights and movement while sidelining broader notions of political responsibility. Deservingness inhabit the tense spaces between individual and collective responsibility, personal narratives and global crises (in the plural), and negotiations of equality and difference around citizenship, without ever resolving them - and that is why it is so effective.
 

I propose a critical exploration of the limits of law and assert that our current inability to propose effective solutions to rightless people requires a closer engagement with citizenship and its margins. Instead of assuming that national citizens deserve all, and that we have to come up with justifications to give gradations of rights to non-citizens, we should further explore the mechanisms, processes, and institutions through which (national) citizenship remains a privileged status. While there seems to be a relationship between law and deservingness, this connection remains underexplored in academia and either ignored or unquestionably accepted in public policy. 
​