Kathleen R. Arnold is the Director of the Refugee and Forced Migration master's program at DePaul University in Chicago. She is the author of six books and numerous chapters and articles. She specializes in analyzing houselessness, poverty, and intersectional vulnerabilities as they relate to migrants.
This article focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates ... more This article focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect, this article suggests that many of Arendt’s analyses of racism, migration, and camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than she did or would have admitted. Arendt’s work importantly suggested that the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the rightlessness of refugees in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreigner and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt’s binary also indicates an adherence to crypto-normativity, despite her professed anti-foundational approach to political issues. Together, her theoretical strengths and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex circumstances experienced today.
... Kathleen Arnold University of Texas. ... internalize societal norms such that they uphold rat... more ... Kathleen Arnold University of Texas. ... internalize societal norms such that they uphold rather than challenge authority - and biopolitical ones (see Foucault, 1980; Agamben ... because of their dedication to their children while men do not (see Wilson, 1997; Jones, 1998; Salzinger ...
In this article, I address a crucial distinction between a sanctuary city (or county or state) an... more In this article, I address a crucial distinction between a sanctuary city (or county or state) and religious-based sanctuary. While I believe both are important forms of resistance to the sovereign powers guiding migration policy and enforcement today, I argue that the latter is more radical. I examine what seems to be a conflation between the two types of sanctuary and the legal context for the necessity of radical, extra-institutional action, even if the latter is also significant. This latest version is probably better than the others ones I have posted--I still need to include more citations for some of my claims and provide more legal resources for others. If you are a researcher in this area and believe I should look at your work or someone else's, please message me. For students who have been assigned to read my work on sanctuary, this is the most current and cleanest version.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a famous distinction between the rights of... more In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a famous distinction between the rights of criminals and the rights of the stateless. This distinction continues to be useful in exposing how policies affecting immigrants radically depart from the legal framework of the criminal justice system, particularly when immigrants are detained and deported. Arendt argues that by committing a crime, an individual has a status as a subject of the law, with corresponding rights. In comparison, she holds that the stateless have no right to rights, connecting this rightlessness to the meaninglessness of human rights in the refugee context and to geographical spaces in which all law has been suspended. Her analysis continues to be important to demonstrate the degree to which migrants in the US are rightless in a way that cannot be reduced to or understood by references to legality or hyper-legality. That is, her work offers a different perspective on these power relations, in contrast to contemporary understandings of US immigration policy as overly-bureaucratized and rule-bound. Rather, Arendt’s treatment of this issue prompts us to consider the dynamic interaction between laws that suspend or alter the law in such a way that the group affected is legally non-existent as well as focusing on geographical spaces where national territory is denationalized and thus made a camp or at least, camp-like. Connected to Arendt’s criminal-stateless distinction, Giorgio Agamben argues that the camp is the nomos of the modern and not the prison, which was the central institution examined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The camp represents, reinforces, and activates a suspension of normal law, thus ensuring that the inmates lack status or rights. As I interpret Agamben’s work, the term camp is not a fixed material structure or geographical site but a denationalized political space that suspends an inmate’s rights. These two distinctions further identify different facets of the comparison between what is viewed as the welfare state (the rule of law on domestic territory) and the warfare state (sovereign matters dealing with foreigners and foreign relations). The criminal system is viewed as part of the former, demonstrating that even those who break the law have the right to rights which is why the prison is interpreted as the geo-spatial materialization of the welfare state while the denationalized space that is the camp would represent the warfare state. While both authors’ distinctions are still relevant, they cannot be accepted wholly. Since the mid1990s, the U.S. criminal justice system has changed in at least two ways: a) more people are being criminally charged, with longer sentences, and greater post-release consequences; b) second, prison conditions have changed, reflecting diminished legal rights and greater tolerance for torture. The emergence of supermax prisons reflects the institutionalization of a new set of practices that seem to warehouse people indefinitely, until they die. Disciplinary techniques are not aimed at a docile citizenry but simply political and social neutralization. The rights of the criminal that Arendt suggests are part of the right to rights have diminished and the material conditions and power relations of confinement have further eroded personhood rights. Personhood is a legal status sometimes conferring certain protections and basic due process, if not the full rights of citizenship. The erosion of personhood for prisoners is particularly interesting as immigrant detention—which is civil and not criminal—is also characterized by diminished personhood rights and concretely, both populations often share space. Although detention is not supposed to constitute punishment, its punitive aspects make the opaque and complex factors of this system even more complicated. 1996 anti-terror provisions have further contributed to this statelessness (or non-personhood status) at the same time as geographically effecting the suspension of the law (through, not in spite of, territorial presence). As I argue, the meaning of personhood in its most positive and diminished forms cannot easily be reduced to the rather static notion of US citizenship but is instead more easily (if not problematically) contextualized in current conceptions of human rights. The moral force of Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinctions is valuable as is their desire to identify how an exception has become the norm. While persuasive, I suggest a different historical dynamic that demonstrates a more mutually constitutive relationship—one that made citizenship itself the exception and personhood the norm and which has blurred inside and outside to both nationalize and denationalize territories. In the end, war is waged on domestic territory while resistance works in and through political practices identifying the weaknesses of and unresolved spaces in this new dynamic.
In this paper I explore how economic policies in the US guest-worker program and the Border Indus... more In this paper I explore how economic policies in the US guest-worker program and the Border Industrial Program (aka the maquila program) are not merely political but specifically sovereign. I examine links between the two programs as well as how both denationalize national territory and thus, obscure the highly political nature of each work arrangement. In spite of these power dynamics, I conclude by exploring modes of resistance in each program, challenging conventional accounts of how works in seemingly pure economic spheres.
In this article, Kathleen Arnold explores the historical roots of President Trump’s legal and yet... more In this article, Kathleen Arnold explores the historical roots of President Trump’s legal and yet unjust travel ban. Were Trump’s moves illegal? Not really—Trump merely used the legal and yet extra-constitutional powers in the immigration system. The closed system of authority over matters of immigration requires revolution and not reform—protest is truly the only way to effect change.
paper presented at the Western for human rights plenary session; part of this is part of current ... more paper presented at the Western for human rights plenary session; part of this is part of current completed book manuscript discussing the links between criminalized racial minorities (particularly the prison system) and criminalized immigrants/refugees (esp. the detention system) (note: I have just updated the paper to correct some type-os and a few incomplete sentences; any end notes I added are marked "update")
In this forthcoming chapter, I link the NYC police Peek a Boo policy to the broken windows theory... more In this forthcoming chapter, I link the NYC police Peek a Boo policy to the broken windows theory and to broader efforts to criminalize status rather than criminal acts. --comments appreciated! This article/chapter is still under construction but it has been updated in 2020.
In this paper, I explore some of the most important gender based refugee claims of women fleeing ... more In this paper, I explore some of the most important gender based refugee claims of women fleeing domestic violence in order to analyze the political implications of realist theory. What is notable in some of the most significant cases is that even when asylum has been denied, case officers and judges have recognized that the “personal is political” in important ways. To put it differently, the structure of these cases—the categories demanded by refugee law and the interpretation of dynamics of each case—has led to institutional recognition that gender based violence is political. Nevertheless, as with more general views on immigration, policy makers, case officers, and judges continue to focus on the individual making the claims and the alleged primitivity of her culture to produce an extraordinary gendered subject. The grant of asylum is individual and she is cast as a unique figure who, by herself, rejected her culture and the gender divisions. While anti-foundational authors from Nietzsche to Foucault provide insights into seeing how the United States constructs these women’s identities, projecting American superiority into their testimonies, the realist theory I propose works with anti-foundationalism, urging us to stop looking to the targets of violence for answers and instead to look at broader power relations that congeal and yet obscure inequality, thus creating a context for violence with impunity. If we revise Weber’s famous observation about the modern state having the monopoly on violence, viewing the right to wield violence as a sort of monopoly on power, this brings attention to the crucial and yet oft-denied link between political power and various forms of gender inequality. Who gets to legitimately wield violence and who is denied the right to resistance or self-defense shape the contours of inclusion and exclusion. In fact, the realism of the “wretched of the earth” illuminates how domestic abuse is a political matter in which some violence is legitimated and the violence of self-defense is not. I will use these cases not to investigate the plight of these women so much as to interrogate the degree to which U.S. democracy can truly be diverse.
An analysis of European homelessness, which considers how homelessness and displacement undermine... more An analysis of European homelessness, which considers how homelessness and displacement undermine conventional notions of citizenship. Published in Socialt Arbete En Grundbok, 3rd ed. in ed.s Marcus Knutagågard, Anna Meeuwisse, Sune Sunesson, and Hans Swärd, Lund University, Sweden (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, November, 2015).
An analysis of prerogative power, broadly conceived; reflecting on how sovereign law is deployed ... more An analysis of prerogative power, broadly conceived; reflecting on how sovereign law is deployed on domestic territory; links to the current War on Terror
Please click link to access paper. This is an article I first wrote and presented in grad school... more Please click link to access paper. This is an article I first wrote and presented in grad school on the theoretical aspects of homelessness.
In this paper, I explore the relevance of Hannah Arendt's work in terms of the merging of the US ... more In this paper, I explore the relevance of Hannah Arendt's work in terms of the merging of the US criminal justice and immigration systems beginning in the mid-1990s. Arendt's work importantly suggested that the stateless were a contemporary phenomenon and so rightless that they lacked even the rights of criminals. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the degree to which innocent refugees are dehumanized due to their foreign status in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreign and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt's binary also indicates an adherence to cryptonormativity, despite her professed anti-foundational approach to political issues. Arendt's analyses of how racism (the "nation" in a eugenic context) "conquer[ed]" the state (that is, the rule of law, democratic equality, and the right to rights) and her identification of totalitarian tools (such as disenfranchisement, camps, and deportation) explain how the category of criminal could approach that of stateless "outlaw" and yet her work does not always fulfill this critical promise. Rather, even in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the binary drawn between criminal and stateless person is indicative of a more ambivalent and sometimes idealized treatment of her subject matter both in terms of historical approach and empirical comparisons she makes. My aim is to understand both the critical force and limitations of Arendt's work in and of itself and also in relation to the merging of US criminal and immigration policies today. I conclude by urging scholars not to dismiss Arendt as overly contradictory (e.g.) but rather to learn not only from her not only from her important theories but also weaknesses in her empirical analyses. Together, her theoretical strength and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex and uncertain circumstances we experience today in the crimmigration system.
This paper is part of a larger book project in which I explore two interesting binaries: first, H... more This paper is part of a larger book project in which I explore two interesting binaries: first, Hannah Arendt's claims that it is better to be a criminal than a stateless person and second, Giorgio Agamben's claim that the camp is the nomos of the modern rather than the prison, thus challenging the primacy Michel Foucault gave to the carceral system in understanding modern power. What these distinctions suggest is that on the one hand, criminal suspects and prisoners have some legal protections and rights in comparison to foreigners caught up in the detention and deportation regime. On the other hand, detention conditions should not be as bad or worse than prison conditions because per the Supreme Court, detention of foreigners is not punishment but is based on their legal status of documented or undocumented. For these reasons, the binaries Arendt and Agamben propose are hierarchical, rather than simply indicating differences. Although a case can be made with each distinction (stateless-criminal and camp-prison), in the context of contemporary U.S. politics, the different spheres implied by each binary are blurred. That is, policies of the carceral state and prison conditions do not just resemble conditions for enemy combatants and immigrant detainees but have important legal connections. These connections do not make each sphere equivalent but do demonstrate how power dynamics in one area inform those in another. I briefly recount three stories in this paper to show how legal power is deployed on U.S. soil to suspend not just rights but legal personhood. Personhood is an in-between legal status that is never quite citizenship and which often means rightlessness. Rather than claiming that people just don’t know about these sorts of cases, I suggest that they do but they justify these tales of exploitation, arbitrary detention, and rightlessness through myths of disposability in which the key figure involved—the tragic hero—must sacrifice a significant amount of herself or himself without ever being deemed “innocent” or being included politically. This failure of inclusion is part of the sacrifice these heroes make: the myth of “earned citizenship” (or prisoners’ rights or refugee status) provides the final tragic element, holding out the hope of greater inclusion only to be denied in the end.
Hunger strikes in Texas detention centers by women refugee petitioners, the suicide attempts by C... more Hunger strikes in Texas detention centers by women refugee petitioners, the suicide attempts by Chelsea Manning and others in solitary confinement, forms of cutting and self-harm at Guantánamo and in supermax prisons, are all embodied forms of protest that seek to alter detainees’ circumstances and gain outside attention through deprivation or self-inflicted pain rather than words. The legal system produces gendered and racialized outcomes while seeking individual, deracinated causes for self-harm. These various acts performed in desperate circumstances bring attention to motherhood, to feelings of self-alienation when gender is misrecognized, or to the pain of separation from one’s children—embodied protest heightens and alters motherhood, gender misrecognition, and inferior racial and alienage statuses. It doesn’t merely fix these statuses but connects them to others, it reaches out to guards who are mothers, politicians who are faced with homophobia, and to the public who has experienced painful family breakup. It is a gesture of an “intimate embrace” that dramatically performs a connection to others through politicizing what has been taken to be depoliticized.
In this paper I discuss the differences between sanctuary cities and church-based sanctuary; the ... more In this paper I discuss the differences between sanctuary cities and church-based sanctuary; the 1980s sanctuary movement in comparison today; and I argue for church-based sanctuary as a way to resist and reconstitute unjust sovereign powers that shape immigration policy today.
This article focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates ... more This article focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect, this article suggests that many of Arendt’s analyses of racism, migration, and camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than she did or would have admitted. Arendt’s work importantly suggested that the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the rightlessness of refugees in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreigner and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt’s binary also indicates an adherence to crypto-normativity, despite her professed anti-foundational approach to political issues. Together, her theoretical strengths and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex circumstances experienced today.
... Kathleen Arnold University of Texas. ... internalize societal norms such that they uphold rat... more ... Kathleen Arnold University of Texas. ... internalize societal norms such that they uphold rather than challenge authority - and biopolitical ones (see Foucault, 1980; Agamben ... because of their dedication to their children while men do not (see Wilson, 1997; Jones, 1998; Salzinger ...
In this article, I address a crucial distinction between a sanctuary city (or county or state) an... more In this article, I address a crucial distinction between a sanctuary city (or county or state) and religious-based sanctuary. While I believe both are important forms of resistance to the sovereign powers guiding migration policy and enforcement today, I argue that the latter is more radical. I examine what seems to be a conflation between the two types of sanctuary and the legal context for the necessity of radical, extra-institutional action, even if the latter is also significant. This latest version is probably better than the others ones I have posted--I still need to include more citations for some of my claims and provide more legal resources for others. If you are a researcher in this area and believe I should look at your work or someone else's, please message me. For students who have been assigned to read my work on sanctuary, this is the most current and cleanest version.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a famous distinction between the rights of... more In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a famous distinction between the rights of criminals and the rights of the stateless. This distinction continues to be useful in exposing how policies affecting immigrants radically depart from the legal framework of the criminal justice system, particularly when immigrants are detained and deported. Arendt argues that by committing a crime, an individual has a status as a subject of the law, with corresponding rights. In comparison, she holds that the stateless have no right to rights, connecting this rightlessness to the meaninglessness of human rights in the refugee context and to geographical spaces in which all law has been suspended. Her analysis continues to be important to demonstrate the degree to which migrants in the US are rightless in a way that cannot be reduced to or understood by references to legality or hyper-legality. That is, her work offers a different perspective on these power relations, in contrast to contemporary understandings of US immigration policy as overly-bureaucratized and rule-bound. Rather, Arendt’s treatment of this issue prompts us to consider the dynamic interaction between laws that suspend or alter the law in such a way that the group affected is legally non-existent as well as focusing on geographical spaces where national territory is denationalized and thus made a camp or at least, camp-like. Connected to Arendt’s criminal-stateless distinction, Giorgio Agamben argues that the camp is the nomos of the modern and not the prison, which was the central institution examined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The camp represents, reinforces, and activates a suspension of normal law, thus ensuring that the inmates lack status or rights. As I interpret Agamben’s work, the term camp is not a fixed material structure or geographical site but a denationalized political space that suspends an inmate’s rights. These two distinctions further identify different facets of the comparison between what is viewed as the welfare state (the rule of law on domestic territory) and the warfare state (sovereign matters dealing with foreigners and foreign relations). The criminal system is viewed as part of the former, demonstrating that even those who break the law have the right to rights which is why the prison is interpreted as the geo-spatial materialization of the welfare state while the denationalized space that is the camp would represent the warfare state. While both authors’ distinctions are still relevant, they cannot be accepted wholly. Since the mid1990s, the U.S. criminal justice system has changed in at least two ways: a) more people are being criminally charged, with longer sentences, and greater post-release consequences; b) second, prison conditions have changed, reflecting diminished legal rights and greater tolerance for torture. The emergence of supermax prisons reflects the institutionalization of a new set of practices that seem to warehouse people indefinitely, until they die. Disciplinary techniques are not aimed at a docile citizenry but simply political and social neutralization. The rights of the criminal that Arendt suggests are part of the right to rights have diminished and the material conditions and power relations of confinement have further eroded personhood rights. Personhood is a legal status sometimes conferring certain protections and basic due process, if not the full rights of citizenship. The erosion of personhood for prisoners is particularly interesting as immigrant detention—which is civil and not criminal—is also characterized by diminished personhood rights and concretely, both populations often share space. Although detention is not supposed to constitute punishment, its punitive aspects make the opaque and complex factors of this system even more complicated. 1996 anti-terror provisions have further contributed to this statelessness (or non-personhood status) at the same time as geographically effecting the suspension of the law (through, not in spite of, territorial presence). As I argue, the meaning of personhood in its most positive and diminished forms cannot easily be reduced to the rather static notion of US citizenship but is instead more easily (if not problematically) contextualized in current conceptions of human rights. The moral force of Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinctions is valuable as is their desire to identify how an exception has become the norm. While persuasive, I suggest a different historical dynamic that demonstrates a more mutually constitutive relationship—one that made citizenship itself the exception and personhood the norm and which has blurred inside and outside to both nationalize and denationalize territories. In the end, war is waged on domestic territory while resistance works in and through political practices identifying the weaknesses of and unresolved spaces in this new dynamic.
In this paper I explore how economic policies in the US guest-worker program and the Border Indus... more In this paper I explore how economic policies in the US guest-worker program and the Border Industrial Program (aka the maquila program) are not merely political but specifically sovereign. I examine links between the two programs as well as how both denationalize national territory and thus, obscure the highly political nature of each work arrangement. In spite of these power dynamics, I conclude by exploring modes of resistance in each program, challenging conventional accounts of how works in seemingly pure economic spheres.
In this article, Kathleen Arnold explores the historical roots of President Trump’s legal and yet... more In this article, Kathleen Arnold explores the historical roots of President Trump’s legal and yet unjust travel ban. Were Trump’s moves illegal? Not really—Trump merely used the legal and yet extra-constitutional powers in the immigration system. The closed system of authority over matters of immigration requires revolution and not reform—protest is truly the only way to effect change.
paper presented at the Western for human rights plenary session; part of this is part of current ... more paper presented at the Western for human rights plenary session; part of this is part of current completed book manuscript discussing the links between criminalized racial minorities (particularly the prison system) and criminalized immigrants/refugees (esp. the detention system) (note: I have just updated the paper to correct some type-os and a few incomplete sentences; any end notes I added are marked "update")
In this forthcoming chapter, I link the NYC police Peek a Boo policy to the broken windows theory... more In this forthcoming chapter, I link the NYC police Peek a Boo policy to the broken windows theory and to broader efforts to criminalize status rather than criminal acts. --comments appreciated! This article/chapter is still under construction but it has been updated in 2020.
In this paper, I explore some of the most important gender based refugee claims of women fleeing ... more In this paper, I explore some of the most important gender based refugee claims of women fleeing domestic violence in order to analyze the political implications of realist theory. What is notable in some of the most significant cases is that even when asylum has been denied, case officers and judges have recognized that the “personal is political” in important ways. To put it differently, the structure of these cases—the categories demanded by refugee law and the interpretation of dynamics of each case—has led to institutional recognition that gender based violence is political. Nevertheless, as with more general views on immigration, policy makers, case officers, and judges continue to focus on the individual making the claims and the alleged primitivity of her culture to produce an extraordinary gendered subject. The grant of asylum is individual and she is cast as a unique figure who, by herself, rejected her culture and the gender divisions. While anti-foundational authors from Nietzsche to Foucault provide insights into seeing how the United States constructs these women’s identities, projecting American superiority into their testimonies, the realist theory I propose works with anti-foundationalism, urging us to stop looking to the targets of violence for answers and instead to look at broader power relations that congeal and yet obscure inequality, thus creating a context for violence with impunity. If we revise Weber’s famous observation about the modern state having the monopoly on violence, viewing the right to wield violence as a sort of monopoly on power, this brings attention to the crucial and yet oft-denied link between political power and various forms of gender inequality. Who gets to legitimately wield violence and who is denied the right to resistance or self-defense shape the contours of inclusion and exclusion. In fact, the realism of the “wretched of the earth” illuminates how domestic abuse is a political matter in which some violence is legitimated and the violence of self-defense is not. I will use these cases not to investigate the plight of these women so much as to interrogate the degree to which U.S. democracy can truly be diverse.
An analysis of European homelessness, which considers how homelessness and displacement undermine... more An analysis of European homelessness, which considers how homelessness and displacement undermine conventional notions of citizenship. Published in Socialt Arbete En Grundbok, 3rd ed. in ed.s Marcus Knutagågard, Anna Meeuwisse, Sune Sunesson, and Hans Swärd, Lund University, Sweden (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, November, 2015).
An analysis of prerogative power, broadly conceived; reflecting on how sovereign law is deployed ... more An analysis of prerogative power, broadly conceived; reflecting on how sovereign law is deployed on domestic territory; links to the current War on Terror
Please click link to access paper. This is an article I first wrote and presented in grad school... more Please click link to access paper. This is an article I first wrote and presented in grad school on the theoretical aspects of homelessness.
In this paper, I explore the relevance of Hannah Arendt's work in terms of the merging of the US ... more In this paper, I explore the relevance of Hannah Arendt's work in terms of the merging of the US criminal justice and immigration systems beginning in the mid-1990s. Arendt's work importantly suggested that the stateless were a contemporary phenomenon and so rightless that they lacked even the rights of criminals. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the degree to which innocent refugees are dehumanized due to their foreign status in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreign and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt's binary also indicates an adherence to cryptonormativity, despite her professed anti-foundational approach to political issues. Arendt's analyses of how racism (the "nation" in a eugenic context) "conquer[ed]" the state (that is, the rule of law, democratic equality, and the right to rights) and her identification of totalitarian tools (such as disenfranchisement, camps, and deportation) explain how the category of criminal could approach that of stateless "outlaw" and yet her work does not always fulfill this critical promise. Rather, even in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the binary drawn between criminal and stateless person is indicative of a more ambivalent and sometimes idealized treatment of her subject matter both in terms of historical approach and empirical comparisons she makes. My aim is to understand both the critical force and limitations of Arendt's work in and of itself and also in relation to the merging of US criminal and immigration policies today. I conclude by urging scholars not to dismiss Arendt as overly contradictory (e.g.) but rather to learn not only from her not only from her important theories but also weaknesses in her empirical analyses. Together, her theoretical strength and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex and uncertain circumstances we experience today in the crimmigration system.
This paper is part of a larger book project in which I explore two interesting binaries: first, H... more This paper is part of a larger book project in which I explore two interesting binaries: first, Hannah Arendt's claims that it is better to be a criminal than a stateless person and second, Giorgio Agamben's claim that the camp is the nomos of the modern rather than the prison, thus challenging the primacy Michel Foucault gave to the carceral system in understanding modern power. What these distinctions suggest is that on the one hand, criminal suspects and prisoners have some legal protections and rights in comparison to foreigners caught up in the detention and deportation regime. On the other hand, detention conditions should not be as bad or worse than prison conditions because per the Supreme Court, detention of foreigners is not punishment but is based on their legal status of documented or undocumented. For these reasons, the binaries Arendt and Agamben propose are hierarchical, rather than simply indicating differences. Although a case can be made with each distinction (stateless-criminal and camp-prison), in the context of contemporary U.S. politics, the different spheres implied by each binary are blurred. That is, policies of the carceral state and prison conditions do not just resemble conditions for enemy combatants and immigrant detainees but have important legal connections. These connections do not make each sphere equivalent but do demonstrate how power dynamics in one area inform those in another. I briefly recount three stories in this paper to show how legal power is deployed on U.S. soil to suspend not just rights but legal personhood. Personhood is an in-between legal status that is never quite citizenship and which often means rightlessness. Rather than claiming that people just don’t know about these sorts of cases, I suggest that they do but they justify these tales of exploitation, arbitrary detention, and rightlessness through myths of disposability in which the key figure involved—the tragic hero—must sacrifice a significant amount of herself or himself without ever being deemed “innocent” or being included politically. This failure of inclusion is part of the sacrifice these heroes make: the myth of “earned citizenship” (or prisoners’ rights or refugee status) provides the final tragic element, holding out the hope of greater inclusion only to be denied in the end.
Hunger strikes in Texas detention centers by women refugee petitioners, the suicide attempts by C... more Hunger strikes in Texas detention centers by women refugee petitioners, the suicide attempts by Chelsea Manning and others in solitary confinement, forms of cutting and self-harm at Guantánamo and in supermax prisons, are all embodied forms of protest that seek to alter detainees’ circumstances and gain outside attention through deprivation or self-inflicted pain rather than words. The legal system produces gendered and racialized outcomes while seeking individual, deracinated causes for self-harm. These various acts performed in desperate circumstances bring attention to motherhood, to feelings of self-alienation when gender is misrecognized, or to the pain of separation from one’s children—embodied protest heightens and alters motherhood, gender misrecognition, and inferior racial and alienage statuses. It doesn’t merely fix these statuses but connects them to others, it reaches out to guards who are mothers, politicians who are faced with homophobia, and to the public who has experienced painful family breakup. It is a gesture of an “intimate embrace” that dramatically performs a connection to others through politicizing what has been taken to be depoliticized.
In this paper I discuss the differences between sanctuary cities and church-based sanctuary; the ... more In this paper I discuss the differences between sanctuary cities and church-based sanctuary; the 1980s sanctuary movement in comparison today; and I argue for church-based sanctuary as a way to resist and reconstitute unjust sovereign powers that shape immigration policy today.
Detainee hunger strikes, lip-sewing, faith-based sanctuary, and sanctuary localities are contempo... more Detainee hunger strikes, lip-sewing, faith-based sanctuary, and sanctuary localities are contemporary strategies challenging increasingly harsh migration policies in countries “hosting” refugees today. Kathleen R. Arnold explores these protests as forms of a “democratic state of exception” that challenge state sovereign powers in Australia and the United States. Although these protests can be characterized as “high-risk,” they expose the multi-faceted harms of mass detention and deportation. Both types of protest arguably mimic facets of sovereign state tactics, including food withdrawal, silence through suturing, and confinement in sanctuary, exposing the deeply traumatic elements of migration enforcement. Rather than interpreting refugee trauma as individual and precluding agency, Arnold contextualizes mental and physical destabilization as elements of public health and political trauma. As she argues, these protest forms unite rational and irrational; individual and community; weakness and power. That is, they often involve expressions of pain and trauma but communicate clear and complex messages; they are reflective of individual circumstances that need more attention but also invoke a community; and they are staged in a context of near-absolute inequality and yet challenge the most coercive and lethal elements of the state. They are acts of dissensus and counter-sovereignty, forming a democratic state of exception. This book should of interest to students, academics (migration scholars, social justice scholars, political theorists), advocates, and the media alike.
... Kathleen Arnold. ... I will not only interrogate the idea that there is a double standard ope... more ... Kathleen Arnold. ... I will not only interrogate the idea that there is a double standard operating in ascetic demands and normative values but also analyze how this double standard is deployed in terms of Michel Foucault's concepts of bio-power and disciplinary power. ...
Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia is one of the first encyclopedia... more Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia is one of the first encyclopedias to address American anti-immigration sentiment. Organized alphabetically, the two-volume work covers major historical periods and relevant concepts, as well as discussions of various anti-immigration stances. Leading figures and groups in the anti-immigration movements of the past and present are also explored.
Bringing together the work of distinguished scholars from many fields, including legal theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists, the work covers aspects and issues related to anti-immigration sentiment from the establishment of the republic to contemporary times. For each time period, there is a focus on key groups, representing both actors and those acted upon. Political concerns of the time are also discussed to broaden understanding of motivation. In addition, entries explore the role of race, gender, and class in determining immigration policy and informing public sentiment.
State and local immigration issues and policies for all 50 states are thoroughly examined in this... more State and local immigration issues and policies for all 50 states are thoroughly examined in this unique, up-to-date, and accessibly written encyclopedia. * Offers topical essays on all 50 U.S. states, covering the history of immigration, state and local policies, and the contributions of various ethnic groups * Provides readers with a big-picture understanding of immigration activity for each state over the past 50 years * Includes chronologies, historical overviews, and topical essays that provide important background and place major events and legislation in context * Offers a "notable figures/groups" section with biographical and group profiles highlighting the contributions made by particular individuals and organizations in relation to immigration
American Immigration After 1996: The Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion, 2011
Few topics generate as much heated public debate in the United States today as immigration across... more Few topics generate as much heated public debate in the United States today as immigration across our southern border. Two positions have been staked out, one favoring the expansion of guest-worker programs and focusing on the economic benefits of immigration, and the other proposing greater physical and other barriers to entry and focusing more on the perceived threat to national security from immigration. Both sides of this debate, however, rely in their arguments on preconceived notions and unexamined assumptions about assimilation, national identity, economic participation, legality, political loyalty, and gender roles. In American Immigration After 1996, Kathleen Arnold aims to reveal more of the underlying complexities of immigration and, in particular, to cast light on the relationship between globalization of the economy and issues of political sovereignty, especially what she calls “prerogative power” as it is exercised by the U.S. government.
America's New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age, 2007
Today’s political controversy over immigration highlights the plight of the working class in this... more Today’s political controversy over immigration highlights the plight of the working class in this country as perhaps no other issue has recently done. The political status of immigrants exposes the power dynamics of the “new working class,” which includes the former labor aristocracy, women, and people of color. This new working class suffers exploitation in advanced industrial countries as the social cost of capitalism’s success in a neoliberal and globalized political economy. Paradoxically, as borders become more open, they are also increasingly fortified, subjecting many workers to the suspension of law. In this book, Kathleen Arnold analyzes the role of the state’s “prerogative power” in creating and sustaining this condition of severe inequality for the most marginalized sectors of our population in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical literature from Locke to Marx and Agamben (whose notion of “bare life” features prominently in her construal of this as a “biopolitical” era), she focuses attention especially on the values of asceticism derived from the Protestant work ethic to explain how they function as ideological justification for the exercise of prerogative power by the state.
As a counter to this repressive set of values, she develops the notion of “authentic love” borrowed from Simone de Beauvoir as a possible approach for dealing with the complex issues of exploitation in liberal democracy today.
In the aftermath of September 11, donations to the poor and homeless have declined while ordinanc... more In the aftermath of September 11, donations to the poor and homeless have declined while ordinances against begging and sleeping in public have increased. The increased security of public spaces has been matched by a quest for increased security and surveillance of immigrants. In this groundbreaking study, Kathleen R. Arnold explores homelessness in terms of the globalization of the economy, national identity, and citizenship. She argues that domestic homelessness and conditions of statelessness, such as refugees, exiles, and poor immigrants, are defined and addressed in similar ways by the political sphere, in such a manner that each of these groups are subjected to policies that perpetuate their exclusion. Drawing on such authors as Freud, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, Lévinas, and Agamben, Arnold argues for a radical politics of homelessness based on extending hospitality and the toleration of difference.
Why Don't You Just Talk to Him? The Politics of Domestic Abuse, 2015
Calling attention to domestic abuse as a political problem, this book seeks to challenge Enlighte... more Calling attention to domestic abuse as a political problem, this book seeks to challenge Enlightenment notions of intimacy that profoundly mistake the nature of control and abuse. In turn, the anti-Enlightenment aspects of intimacy are rooted in tensions and contradictions of American society, which often assume that communication and egalitarian practices (such as mediation) preclude destructive tendencies and hostility. A revised notion of political realism allows understanding of hierarchical, unsympathetic, and even violent aspects of modern, enlightened politics as normal if not undesirable. Indeed, this book explores how Enlightenment ideals continue to deny or obscure hierarchy, coercive control, and violence even while they make these dynamics possible. Specifically, even as intimate partnerships are less formal today, they are often viewed as being rooted in equality, mutuality, and consent. Accordingly, abuse is often interpreted as symmetrical and dominant policy solutions encourage communication and education, alongside law-and-order solutions like dual arrest. In contrast, abusers operate according to assumptions that their targets are unequal, inferior, and deserve to be controlled and assaulted. Communication with a target or in a batterer intervention program can help the abuser to deploy these tools against the target. Two of the most significant gender-based asylum cases help to crystallize these issues, recasting self-defense as political expression and the belief that one partner should not control and assault the other as “feminism.” In this context, communicative solutions discursively make a situation equal that is not; therapy, shelters, and lawyers often reinforce these inequalities.
Anna Marie Smith and I have similar concerns about the poor, racism and sexism. Yet we view polit... more Anna Marie Smith and I have similar concerns about the poor, racism and sexism. Yet we view political theory in different ways. Smith has focused on one set of programs and gives the reader a richly detailed view of recent welfare laws. In contrast, I have tried to do something very different. First, I use Giorgio Agamben's ideas as a foil, drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to supplement this reading, and I investigate the ideas of John Locke (rather than Thomas Hobbes) to understand sovereignty today. By looking at Locke, we can understand how representative government based on the rule of law and equality can coexist with prerogative power used systematically and domestically. Instead of a top-down view of power, I argue that modern power is characterized by the dispersal of sovereignty and, importantly, prerogative power (the legal suspension of the law). Thus, even as national borders have become more open (both with economic globalization and post-Clausewitzean...
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Ric... more Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class is both a work of political science and a contribution to broad public discussion of distributive politics. Its topic could not be more relevant to a US polity wracked by bitter partisan disagreements about taxes, social spending, financial regulation, social insecurity, and inequality. The political power of “the rich” is a theme of widespread public attention. The headline on the cover of the January–February 2011 issue of The American Interest—“Inequality and Democracy: Are Plutocrats Drowning Our Republic?”—is indicative. Francis Fukuyama's lead essay, entitled “Left Out,” clarifies that by “plutocracy,” the journal means “not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often ...
Kathleen R Arnold NPR Interview regarding sanctuary locality ordinances
Oct 11-Esther Yoon-Ji Ka... more Kathleen R Arnold NPR Interview regarding sanctuary locality ordinances Oct 11-Esther Yoon-Ji Kang, "What Does it Mean for Chicago to be a Sanctuary City?" (4 1/2 minutes)
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Papers by Katy Arnold
While both authors’ distinctions are still relevant, they cannot be accepted wholly. Since the mid1990s, the U.S. criminal justice system has changed in at least two ways: a) more people are being criminally charged, with longer sentences, and greater post-release consequences; b) second, prison conditions have changed, reflecting diminished legal rights and greater tolerance for torture. The emergence of supermax prisons reflects the institutionalization of a new set of practices that seem to warehouse people indefinitely, until they die. Disciplinary techniques are not aimed at a docile citizenry but simply political and social neutralization.
The rights of the criminal that Arendt suggests are part of the right to rights have diminished and the material conditions and power relations of confinement have further eroded personhood rights. Personhood is a legal status sometimes conferring certain protections and basic due process, if not the full rights of citizenship. The erosion of personhood for prisoners is particularly interesting as immigrant detention—which is civil and not criminal—is also characterized by diminished personhood rights and concretely, both populations often share space. Although detention is not supposed to constitute punishment, its punitive aspects make the opaque and complex factors of this system even more complicated. 1996 anti-terror provisions have further contributed to this statelessness (or non-personhood status) at the same time as geographically effecting the suspension of the law (through, not in spite of, territorial presence). As I argue, the meaning of personhood in its most positive and diminished forms cannot easily be reduced to the rather static notion of US citizenship but is instead more easily (if not problematically) contextualized in current conceptions of human rights. The moral force of Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinctions is valuable as is their desire to identify how an exception has become the norm. While persuasive, I suggest a different historical dynamic that demonstrates a more mutually constitutive relationship—one that made citizenship itself the exception and personhood the norm and which has blurred inside and outside to both nationalize and denationalize territories. In the end, war is waged on domestic territory while resistance works in and through political practices identifying the weaknesses of and unresolved spaces in this new dynamic.
Conference Presentations by Katy Arnold
Drafts by Katy Arnold
detainees’ circumstances and gain outside attention through deprivation or self-inflicted pain rather than words. The legal system produces gendered and racialized outcomes while seeking individual, deracinated causes for self-harm. These various acts performed in desperate circumstances bring attention to motherhood, to feelings of self-alienation when gender is misrecognized, or to the pain of separation from one’s children—embodied protest heightens and alters motherhood, gender misrecognition, and inferior racial and alienage statuses. It doesn’t merely fix these statuses but connects them to others, it reaches out to guards who are mothers, politicians who are faced with homophobia, and to the public who has experienced painful family breakup. It is a gesture of an “intimate embrace” that dramatically performs a connection to others through politicizing what has been taken to be depoliticized.
While both authors’ distinctions are still relevant, they cannot be accepted wholly. Since the mid1990s, the U.S. criminal justice system has changed in at least two ways: a) more people are being criminally charged, with longer sentences, and greater post-release consequences; b) second, prison conditions have changed, reflecting diminished legal rights and greater tolerance for torture. The emergence of supermax prisons reflects the institutionalization of a new set of practices that seem to warehouse people indefinitely, until they die. Disciplinary techniques are not aimed at a docile citizenry but simply political and social neutralization.
The rights of the criminal that Arendt suggests are part of the right to rights have diminished and the material conditions and power relations of confinement have further eroded personhood rights. Personhood is a legal status sometimes conferring certain protections and basic due process, if not the full rights of citizenship. The erosion of personhood for prisoners is particularly interesting as immigrant detention—which is civil and not criminal—is also characterized by diminished personhood rights and concretely, both populations often share space. Although detention is not supposed to constitute punishment, its punitive aspects make the opaque and complex factors of this system even more complicated. 1996 anti-terror provisions have further contributed to this statelessness (or non-personhood status) at the same time as geographically effecting the suspension of the law (through, not in spite of, territorial presence). As I argue, the meaning of personhood in its most positive and diminished forms cannot easily be reduced to the rather static notion of US citizenship but is instead more easily (if not problematically) contextualized in current conceptions of human rights. The moral force of Arendt’s and Agamben’s distinctions is valuable as is their desire to identify how an exception has become the norm. While persuasive, I suggest a different historical dynamic that demonstrates a more mutually constitutive relationship—one that made citizenship itself the exception and personhood the norm and which has blurred inside and outside to both nationalize and denationalize territories. In the end, war is waged on domestic territory while resistance works in and through political practices identifying the weaknesses of and unresolved spaces in this new dynamic.
detainees’ circumstances and gain outside attention through deprivation or self-inflicted pain rather than words. The legal system produces gendered and racialized outcomes while seeking individual, deracinated causes for self-harm. These various acts performed in desperate circumstances bring attention to motherhood, to feelings of self-alienation when gender is misrecognized, or to the pain of separation from one’s children—embodied protest heightens and alters motherhood, gender misrecognition, and inferior racial and alienage statuses. It doesn’t merely fix these statuses but connects them to others, it reaches out to guards who are mothers, politicians who are faced with homophobia, and to the public who has experienced painful family breakup. It is a gesture of an “intimate embrace” that dramatically performs a connection to others through politicizing what has been taken to be depoliticized.
Bringing together the work of distinguished scholars from many fields, including legal theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists, the work covers aspects and issues related to anti-immigration sentiment from the establishment of the republic to contemporary times. For each time period, there is a focus on key groups, representing both actors and those acted upon. Political concerns of the time are also discussed to broaden understanding of motivation. In addition, entries explore the role of race, gender, and class in determining immigration policy and informing public sentiment.
In this book, Kathleen Arnold analyzes the role of the state’s “prerogative power” in creating and sustaining this condition of severe inequality for the most marginalized sectors of our population in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical literature from Locke to Marx and Agamben (whose notion of “bare life” features prominently in her construal of this as a “biopolitical” era), she focuses attention especially on the values of asceticism derived from the Protestant work ethic to explain how they function as ideological justification for the exercise of prerogative power by the state.
As a counter to this repressive set of values, she develops the notion of “authentic love” borrowed from Simone de Beauvoir as a possible approach for dealing with the complex issues of exploitation in liberal democracy today.
Oct 11-Esther Yoon-Ji Kang, "What Does it Mean for Chicago to be a Sanctuary City?" (4 1/2 minutes)