Workers from the Global South with temporary immigration status provide a transitory, cheap, exploitable workforce that is responsive to economic vicissitudes and supremacist anti-migration discourse. They are created as an exceptional category of persons “essential” for their work but with no right to remain and claim citizenship-type entitlement to the Global North. The programs in agriculture are rooted in the legacies of indentureship, plantation, and other forms of racialized coerced labour. These programs continue to entrench a neocolonial racial capitalist global order where “unfree labour” is sanctified by contemporary liberal laws. Caught in the vice of a hegemonic, racial, state-governed project, migrant farmworkers are caught in what Best and Hartman call a “negative relation to law”—marked by “the necessity of legal remedy” but “the impossibility of redress.” Scholars within the Black radical tradition have configured fugitivity, or the practice of refusal, as a form of liberatory resistance that subverts the politics of recognition. The concept of fugitivity has been used in recent scholarship on illegalized crossings of securitized borders; but fugitive resistance is not meant to be seen in the registers of the established scripts of liberal resistance, such as legal claims. Using empirical evidence from migrant worker organizing in Canada, this paper suggests the possibility of radical legal mobilization that centres a praxis of refusal. This approach uses the law not for statist benevolence but as a counter-pedagogy for challenging neocolonial, racial capitalist sites and reframing the movement of marginalized, racialized persons. Such a legal mobilization enables and supports ‘fugitive’ actions of migrant workers––agentic choices by workers that reject, refuse, and escape the system that creates racialized unfreedoms. I show that radical legal mobilization can be conceptualized to involve three modalities of praxis (subversive legality, relationship-building, and radical knowledge production) that map to the three themes of performance, sociality, and futurity/imagination found in Fred Moten’s work.
{"title":"Radical Resistance in the Penumbra of the Law: Legal Mobilization for Migrant Farmworkers under Neo-colonial Racial Capitalism","authors":"Vasanthi Venkatesh","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1489","url":null,"abstract":"Workers from the Global South with temporary immigration status provide a transitory, cheap, exploitable workforce that is responsive to economic vicissitudes and supremacist anti-migration discourse. They are created as an exceptional category of persons “essential” for their work but with no right to remain and claim citizenship-type entitlement to the Global North. The programs in agriculture are rooted in the legacies of indentureship, plantation, and other forms of racialized coerced labour. These programs continue to entrench a neocolonial racial capitalist global order where “unfree labour” is sanctified by contemporary liberal laws. Caught in the vice of a hegemonic, racial, state-governed project, migrant farmworkers are caught in what Best and Hartman call a “negative relation to law”—marked by “the necessity of legal remedy” but “the impossibility of redress.” Scholars within the Black radical tradition have configured fugitivity, or the practice of refusal, as a form of liberatory resistance that subverts the politics of recognition. The concept of fugitivity has been used in recent scholarship on illegalized crossings of securitized borders; but fugitive resistance is not meant to be seen in the registers of the established scripts of liberal resistance, such as legal claims. Using empirical evidence from migrant worker organizing in Canada, this paper suggests the possibility of radical legal mobilization that centres a praxis of refusal. This approach uses the law not for statist benevolence but as a counter-pedagogy for challenging neocolonial, racial capitalist sites and reframing the movement of marginalized, racialized persons. Such a legal mobilization enables and supports ‘fugitive’ actions of migrant workers––agentic choices by workers that reject, refuse, and escape the system that creates racialized unfreedoms. I show that radical legal mobilization can be conceptualized to involve three modalities of praxis (subversive legality, relationship-building, and radical knowledge production) that map to the three themes of performance, sociality, and futurity/imagination found in Fred Moten’s work.","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"37 1","pages":"22-48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1489&context=jlsp","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147903627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Two recent decisions of the Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court, Evans (2016) and Brett (2020), introduced a dangerous new idea into homeless encampment jurisprudence: that the purportedly “private” character of encampment sites determines that defendants’ Charter rights are not engaged, and that government landowners are entitled to interlocutory injunctions evicting homeless encampments from publicly owned land. These decisions distort the established test for engaging section 2(b) of the Charter, collapsing a nuanced spectrum of government-owned property into a formalistic dichotomy in which any state-owned property that is not formally open to the public as of right is “private property” for civil and constitutional purposes. Moreover, they inappropriately extend the section 2(b) “public arena” inquiry to section 7, ignoring the established test for engagement of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. These decisions drop the already low bar for granting interlocutory injunctions to evict homeless encampments from publicly owned land onto the ground, further tilting the homeless encampment litigation playing field against some of society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members. They should not be followed.
{"title":"When Should Publicly Owned Land Be Considered Private in Homeless Encampment Cases? A Critique of Recent Developments in BC","authors":"Stepan Wood","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1452","url":null,"abstract":"Two recent decisions of the Chief Justice of the BC Supreme Court, Evans (2016) and Brett (2020), introduced a dangerous new idea into homeless encampment jurisprudence: that the purportedly “private” character of encampment sites determines that defendants’ Charter rights are not engaged, and that government landowners are entitled to interlocutory injunctions evicting homeless encampments from publicly owned land. These decisions distort the established test for engaging section 2(b) of the Charter, collapsing a nuanced spectrum of government-owned property into a formalistic dichotomy in which any state-owned property that is not formally open to the public as of right is “private property” for civil and constitutional purposes. Moreover, they inappropriately extend the section 2(b) “public arena” inquiry to section 7, ignoring the established test for engagement of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. These decisions drop the already low bar for granting interlocutory injunctions to evict homeless encampments from publicly owned land onto the ground, further tilting the homeless encampment litigation playing field against some of society’s most marginalized and vulnerable members. They should not be followed.","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136329816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Homeless Encampments: A Philosophical Justification","authors":"Terry Skolnik","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1453","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77456537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Property Says No: Relational (In)Equality, Encampments, and Property Rights","authors":"Sarah E. Hamill","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1454","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81248388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue on Housing Precarity and Human Rights","authors":"Alexandra Flynn, Estair Van Wagner","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1448","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83963649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersections between Precarious Housing and Residential Tenancy Law: A Review of A Complex Exile and Recent Legal Scholarship on Residential Tenancies","authors":"Anna Lund","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1451","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81486294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Colonialism of Eviction","authors":"Sarah M. Buhler, Patricia Barkaskas","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1450","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82966113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Somebody’s street’: Eviction of Homeless Encampments as a Reflection of Interlocking Colonial and Class Relations","authors":"J. Braimoh, E. Dej, C. Sanders","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1449","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"173 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75475995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who Owns the City? Pension Fund Capitalism and the Parkdale Rent Strike","authors":"Jamie Shilton","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1421","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75708224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Abortion Law Preformed","authors":"Joanna N. Erdman","doi":"10.60082/0829-3929.1423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60082/0829-3929.1423","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":89609,"journal":{"name":"Northwestern journal of law and social policy","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73854332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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