Unbound: the Harvard Journal of the Legal Left is now accepting submissions for our 2019-2020 volume, “Critical Perspectives on (Im)migration and Personhood.” We seek submissions that challenge mainstream narratives and understandings of immigration, migration, and legal personhood within or beyond the nation-state from a Left perspective, broadly construed.
As historian Mae Ngai has demonstrated, laws restricting or/and enabling immigration to the U.S. have functioned to produce “impossible subjects,” whose existence is a material and social fact while simultaneously remaining a “legal impossibility.” This situation, according to Amna Akbar and Sameer Ashar, maintains and exacerbates a hierarchical system conducive to capitalist white supremacy. Yet, the process of defining human movement as legal or illegal has always been contingent, offering the potential for alternative orientations to (im)migration. Given that the law constructs and manipulates the categories of “the immigrant” and “the migrant,” we hope to assemble a critical set of perspectives that analyze both the hierarchizing power attendant in such distinctions, as well as the potential for their disruption.
We welcome submissions from legal scholars, practitioners, activists, and others working in relation to law or legal institutions. Essays might consider immigration, migration, and legal personhood in relation to: U.S. militarism and imperialism; race-based oppression; gender and sexuality; uneven environmental devastation; labor, trade, and other aspects of political economy. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible topics.
Submissions should be no longer than 15,000 words. Footnotes should be in standard Bluebook style; however, we will work with you to convert them to the Bluebook format if it is not a familiar style. Our submission deadline is January 15, 2020. We look forward to reading your submissions!