The making (and unmaking) of refugeeness and legal personhood

During this seminar, Maria Bexelius will discuss aspects of her ongoing PhD-project. In her thesis, she explores how the figure of the refugee is constituted by law – historically and today – in Swedish asylum law (1914-2021) and the ICCPR, and how this refugee-making feeds into processes of person-making and the (re)production of inequalities. She is mapping inclusionary and exclusionary power practices in law, including the interplay between legal precision and vagueness. This means that she seeks to identify practices that both make and unmake the refugee, for example, categorizations– based on nationality, gender, class, political opinion, and ethnicity etc.–, selective legal interpretations, discourses, and silences as well as uses of dichotomies such as the public vs. the private, the genuine refugee vs. the fraudulent asylum seeker or the political refugee vs. the economic migrant. 

Bio

Maria Bexelius, PhD student in Public International Law (with a focus on Migration Law) at Uppsala University. She is also a lecturer in human rights and democracy at University College Stockholm.