2015/2016 Janey annual Workshop: Emmanuel Guerisoli and Fabiola de Lachica
Monday, February 22nd | 12 pm History Conference Room (Room 529, 5th Floor, 80 5th Avenue building).
Janey Fellows, Emmanuel Guerisoli and Fabiola de Lachica will be presenting their ongoing work based on the 2015/16 Janey Summer Fellowship they were awarded.
Emmanuel Guerisoli: Disincorporation Regimes: Theorizing Expulsion in Liberal Democracies
This paper aims to critique the inclusionary nature of liberal democracies by first, demystifying the notions of civic nationalism and universal citizenship; second, contending that democratic regimes inherently carry exclusionary dynamics; and third, proposing a theoretical framework that we denominate disincorporation regimes that explain how the expulsion of certain groups from citizenship and membership occur within liberal democracies. We consider that notions such as discrimination and marginalization are not suitable to properly understand and describe the casting out of citizens not deemed autochthonous. This article posits the thesis that the resurgence of nativist discourses of belonging and their mainstream capability, after national crisis, trigger what we call disincorporation regimes. These processes have multiple modalities and degrees of materialization and institutionalization. They describe how formal citizens, whose ethno-cultural markers of identity are incompatible with the values of the political community, of democratic regimes are expelled from the demos and become denizens.
Fabiola de Lachica: What kind of emergency is this? The Mexican government and local organizations in the case of Villas de Salvarcar massacre
Ciudad Juárez in Mexico has been on the international spotlight for a few decades, particularly for its high degrees of violence. However, there is another particularity of Juárez that, albeit its lower degree of media attention, has been central to the social, political, and economical organization of the city: its organizational culture. Ciudad Juárez has one of the densest organizational networks of the country, and local organizations have been fighting structural conditions of urban poverty, violence, and isolation for decades. This paper focuses on a particular milestone for the city, the Villas de Salvarcar massacre in January 2010. The coldblooded murder of teenagers at a birthday party was the trigger for federal intervention in Juárez and a turning point for the organizational structure of the whole city. I argue that the singular positions of local organizations as insiders, and the federal government as an outsider led to different conceptualizations of Villas de Salvarcar. While the federal government framed the event as an emergency, and placed violence at center-stage for an intervention strategy; local organizations went through a different sense-making process, and thus different modes of action and formulation of strategy. I use 14 interviews with organization founders, directors and area coordinators to illustrate the experience of this particular moment, and the effects it had for Juarez’s organizational structure at that particular moment and even after the “emergency situation” had passed.