Feminist periscoping in research on border enforcement and human rights

Abstract

Border and immigration enforcement is a key contemporary site for human rights concerns. The policies and practices of enforcement are notoriously difficult to research. In our work as feminist political geographers of immigration and border enforcement, we have repeatedly navigated methodological challenges in our attempts to understand how border enforcement policies emerge and play out in ways that infringe on the human rights of migrants and other marginalized populations. In this article, we explore feminist periscoping, a methodological approach developed by feminist geographer Nancy Hiemstra, which we have employed in our own efforts to understand the policies and practices of contemporary border and immigration enforcement and their impact on human rights. As a distinctly feminist and geographic methodological approach, feminist periscoping is useful for studying a broad range of difficult-to-access sites and processes.

Additional information

Funding

This piece was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.

Notes on contributors

Jill M. Williams

Jill M. Williams is an associate research professor in the Southwest Institute for Research on Women and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona. Her work employs a feminist geographic approach to examine the way in which transnational human rights and state sovereignty are negotiated within the context of contemporary border enforcement efforts. She has published in journals such as Political Geography, Environmental and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Geopolitics. She also serves as the director of the University of Arizona’s Women in Science and Engineering Program.

Kate Coddington

Kate Coddington is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her work focuses on borders, migration, and postcolonial governance in the Asia-Pacific region. She has published related work in journals such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2020), Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2018), and The Professional Geographer (2017), as well as in several edited books.