Young, Julie

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10133/6606

Browse

Browsing Young, Julie by Subject "Canada-US border"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Counter-archive as methodology: activating oral histories of the contested Canada-US border
    (2023) Reynolds, Johanna; Wu, Grace; Young, Julie
    Remembering Refuge: Between Sanctuary and Solidarity is a counter-archive based on oral history interviews with people who crossed the Canada-US border to seek refuge and advocacy groups working at this border in two moments of crisis: the 1980s Central American crisis and the 2017-19 crisis at Roxham Road. This paper foregrounds counter-archiving as a methodology, building from the oral histories to illustrate how borders and bordering practices are navigated and contested and how these lived experiences push back at state-directed logics and narratives of migration. By drawing connections across past and present struggles over mobilities and borders, we offer a critical genealogy of refuge around the Canada-US border. The oral histories collectively and individually contest state-led narratives of migration as a ‘crisis,’ the need for borders to be further securitized, and specifically of the Canadian state’s generous humanitarianism towards a select few. We introduce the methodological choices, contexts, and limitations of the project’s research design, and present two themes that emerged from the oral histories: the contested element of ‘choice’ in migration movements and the important roles played by resistance and refusal in the working out of borders. Finally, we emphasize that relationships between borders are crucial to understanding the histories of asylum around this border, and the political shift activated by the counter-archive of centering borders as lived, experienced, contested or refused.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Seeing like a border city: refugee politics at the borders of city and nation-state
    (Sage, 2019) Young, Julie E. E.
    Local advocacy practices in Detroit–Windsor in response to the refugee “crisis” that unfolded around the Canada–US border in early 1987 revealed a different way of working with the border in the city. They were “seeing like a border city”: working as though Detroit–Windsor were one place, even as they made use of the ways in which it remained two distinct places with different political and legal contexts. Advocates mobilized resources and expertise on both sides of the border, drawing on the sense of community offered by the city, and made use of the distinct policy frameworks, securing legal status for refugees who had been consigned to legal limbo through the policies of both states. This approach troubled the state’s logic of border control even as it refortified the boundaries of exclusion underlying it. Their work highlights the possibilities and limitations of advocacy work around an international boundary line.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The border as archive: reframing the crisis mode of governance at the Canada-US border
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022) Young, Julie E. E.
    Starting in January 2017 there was a dramatic increase in the number of people crossing irregularly from the US to make a claim for refugee status in Canada. Officials declared a crisis and admonished those who, in the words of one official, were crossing ‘in between the border.’ It is important to pay close attention to these spaces in-between borders: those (un)intended and strategic openings left by the working out of nation-state policies (like the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement) and those paths that are opened through the transgressions of those borders by people on the move. Crisis is the necessary corollary of the ‘politics of anticipatory governance’ that scaffolds contemporary nation-statist border control policies and practices. Approaching the border as an archive means confronting the work that is done by such temporal and spatial manipulations, while placing contested border crossings at the centre of border formation. By examining a series of intersecting moments from the recent history of this border (1987–present), I seek to both ‘inhabit’ the crisis and understand what might remain once the crisis is declared over. I argue that migration management regimes produce the border crises they anticipate while simultaneously masking and revealing contested histories and geographies of migration.