Overview

Providing a radical new approach to labour migration, this book challenges the prevailing legal and political construction of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer, whilst at the same time reimagining this irregularity as the basis of an alternative, post-capitalist, sociality. The text draws on the work of contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, and more specifically his term ‘ecotechnics’, in order to examine how economic, political, and juridical norms deny the full legal status of certain people who are deemed to be irregular. This ostensible irregularity is revealed as a regular feature of labour market practice, and a necessary support for the conceptual foundations of capitalist legality. As this book shows, however, this legality – and with it, the technological subordination of life to the circulation of capital as if this were the only possibility for our being in the world – is not insurmountable. The book’s consideration of the figure of the irregular migrant labourer comes to provide an alternative basis for reimagining our relationship not only with migration and with labour itself, but ultimately with each other. This powerful analysis of contemporary labour migration is of considerable interest to legal and political theorists, philosophers, labour lawyers, migration experts, and others with theoretical, political, or policy interests in this area.

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9781138700499

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Reviews

'This fantastic book marks a significant addition to the conceptual and theoretical tools for analysing contemporary human mobility. Through an analysis of migration/movement and Labour/active life, Tataryn explores how our coming together in a shared world is not only governed but shaped through nation states, markets and law. She demonstrates how labour migration helps us better understand and imagine contemporary socialities, and goes beyond critique to open up new possibilities for imagining ways of being together in the world. Migration needs new thinking, and this is what this book gives us.' - Bridget Anderson, Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol ,UK. 'A new light is shed on labour migration with this book. Through Jean Luc Nancy's work on ecotechnics, Tataryn links the political dimension of migration with geopolitical, technological, legal, philosophical and broadly understood ecological concepts, and allows us to imagine a new material and embodied way of conceptualising migration and thereby resisting easy neoliberal constructions. It shows how migration is not an isolated phenomenon but the inescapable sense of our ontological condition. This is a profoundly topical book, unapologetically putting labour migration at the forefront of the contemporary global political move to the right, and offering strategies of resistance that question the usual preponderance of the market, the nation-state and the law. Migration is no longer a problem to be solved but an onto-epistemic plurality of flows.' - Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster, UK.

Author Information

Anastasia Tataryn is an Assistant Professor at St. Jerome’s University of Waterloo, Canada.

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