Lori Publishes Research Article in Geopolitics
Pardee Professor Noora Lori recently published a research article in Geopolitics journal named “Zombies, Miracles, and Memory: Towards a Research Agenda on Mobility, Temporality, and Political Possibility.” Co-authored with Loren Landau and Anne McNevin, this paper “introduces a research agenda for reimagining political possibilities by placing multiple temporalities at the centre of analyses of human mobility.”
Unlike recent studies in migration focusing on how states employ time to regulate movement, this paper acknowledged a broader conceptual shift that identifies temporality as a “terrain of friction, fragmentation and, and political imagination.” The authors explained geopolitical stakes of the move with three examples from diverse geographies encapsulating three primary ideas including zombie citizenship, miracles, and memory.
Sketches of zombies, miracles, and memories in Lori’s paper illustrated how nonlinear temporalities connect with various types of human mobility, resulting in emergent political phenomena. The authors neither condoned nor condemned what is emergent in the examples mentioned. Instead, they attempted to persuade migration researchers to take into account aspects like mobility, informality, historical retellings, and transnational action by migrants and states that facilitate and demand unnamed political forms.
Through the paper, the authors intend to call for a normative and epistemological recalibration, enabling recognition of diverse political claims, necessities and desires, and political possibilities.
To read Professor Lori’s full research article, click here.
Noora Lori is an associate professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. She is also the director of the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) initiative. With a broad focus on citizenship, migration, and statelessness, Lori has written about citizenship regimes and naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Her first book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2019), received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020). To read more about her work and achievements, visit her faculty profile.