William Walters | Carleton University (original) (raw)
Papers by William Walters
Environment & Politics C: Politics & Space, 2024
It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise o... more It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise of force. Yet surprisingly a focus on forces and bodies, and more generally the question of corporeality, has rarely been foregrounded by migration scholars looking at deportation. Academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body. Why not deportation? Building on fieldwork with cantonal police units in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017, this paper calls for scholars of deportation to take corporeality seriously. We follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related experts and authorities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story in the state's struggle for sovereignty and racialised removal, since we should equally register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, medicating, consoling, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. To overlook the corporeal is to risk producing an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation.
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Tintin Wulia: Secrets, 2023
This is a short essay I contributed to the exhibition catalogue Tintin Wulia: Secrets, curated by... more This is a short essay I contributed to the exhibition catalogue Tintin Wulia: Secrets, curated by Andrew Tetzlaff. You can see the catalogue online at
https://rmitgallery.com/digital/all/tintin-wulia-secrets-digital-catalogue/
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Mobilities, 2024
This paper calls for greater attention to air deportation, defined as the multiple ways in which ... more This paper calls for greater attention to air deportation, defined as the multiple ways in which states utilize aviation systems for the purpose of expelling unwanted people under immigration and criminal law. Civil aviation is pivotal to the expulsion of people from the countries of the global North, yet scholars of deportation have rarely addressed ques- tions of aerial mobility. The paper makes two moves to centre aerial and carceral mobilities within the study of deportation. (1) Empirically, and taking the UK for its case material, it brings scholarly attention to one particular practice of air deportation: the phenomenon of charter flights. These are special operations on which there are no regular pas- sengers, just deportees who are out-numbered by Detainee Custody Officers and other authorities. (2) Conceptually, the paper develops three tools from this case to advance the study of carceral circuits and mobilities: custodial chains, affordances and encumbrances. By helping us better understand agonistic power relations, and by offering a con- textualized account of change attuned to the interplay of a variety of factors, these concepts can promote a more mobilities-attuned under- standing of deportation by plane. They can also help us better under- stand tension and transformation in carceral mobilities.
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![Research paper thumbnail of Entrevista. Gubernamentalidad y más allá [Interview (with Colin Gordon): Governmentality and beyond]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/111107824/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](El Gobierno Como Problema (II), eds D. Chao and M. Del Valle, 2023
This is a Spanish translation of C. Gordon, M. Tazzioli and W. Walters, "Governmentality and bey... more This is a Spanish translation of C. Gordon, M. Tazzioli and W. Walters, "Governmentality and beyond: an interview with Colin Gordon" in W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (eds), Handbook of Governmentality, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2023, pp.136-155.
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Viapolitics. Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion. Walters W., Heller C., Pezzani L. (eds), 2021
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Handbook on Governmentality, 2023
Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose are three of the most original and influential t... more Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose are three of the most original and influential thinkers to have engaged with Foucault and governmentality. This chapter presents a conversation between these scholars on such questions as power, governmentality, populism, biopolitics, and methods and styles of critical inquiry.
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Handbook on Governmentality, 2023
This chapter offers a conversation with Colin Gordon, a pioneering figure in the field of Foucaul... more This chapter offers a conversation with Colin Gordon, a pioneering figure in the field of Foucault and governmentality scholarship. This conversation explores a number of themes which include Gordon’s role in the landmark publication, The Foucault Effect, his thoughts on neoliberalism and post-Truth politics, his take on the emergence and character of governmentality studies, his view that Foucault’s work points us towards a genealogy of the political, and how our notions of politics and power (including governmentality) need to be updated to understand today’s present (including Brexit).
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antiAtlas Journal, 2022
This article examines anarchist struggles against deportation in France, reconstructing their fra... more This article examines anarchist struggles against deportation in France, reconstructing their fragmented history. We highlight the idea of a "deportation machine" that these campaigns popularized, and ask how these movements expand the field of political action beyond the state, entangling airlines, airports, travel agents, and other commercial actors in the struggle against deportation.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This is the prepublication version of the Introduction to the book: State Secrecy and Security: R... more This is the prepublication version of the Introduction to the book:
State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge 2021).
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First developed by Michel Foucault more than thirty years ago, "governmentality" has become an es... more First developed by Michel Foucault more than thirty years ago, "governmentality" has become an essential set of tools for many researchers in the social and political sciences today. What is "governmentality"? How does this perspective challenge the way we understand political power and its contestation? This new introduction offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students both a highly accessible guide and an original contribution to debates about power and governmentality.
The book aims to serve four main functions:
- To situate governmentality as an intellectual development within Foucault’s thinking about the microphysics of power and his genealogical methods;
- To reveal how research in governmentality has changed as the idea encounters new academic fields, political contexts and regional settings;
- To examine one of the more recent encounters between governmentality and the social sciences - its interaction with international relations and global politics;
- To offer researchers some methodological suggestions for undertaking studies in governmentality, stressing that its critical edge becomes blunted if it is detached from historical/genealogical modes of inquiry.
This book offers a set of conceptual and methodological observations intended to keep research in governmentality a living, critical thought project. Above all, it argues that the challenge of understanding the world calls for the addition of new thinking equipment to the governmentality toolbox. Governmentality: Critical Encounters will prove useful for students of social and political theory, international relations, political sociology, anthropology and geography.
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Studies in Social Justice, 2018
Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship... more Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining the bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation of migratory processes. Yet the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. While Foucault was insistent that governmentality should orient itself to the understanding of singularities, too often race appears, when treated at all, as a general phenomenon. This article makes two contributions aimed at addressing these shortcomings. First, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts this scholarship. Second, we look to recent debates about race and racism in Science & Technology Studies for useful theoretical innovations that might help us study border-and race-making as mutually constitutive processes.
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Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion, 2022
This is the introductory chapter to the book Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Lo... more This is the introductory chapter to the book Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion, published by Duke University Press, 2022. It can also be accessed here:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1428-7_601.pdf
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Biopolitik – in der Debatte, 2011
... Gewiss geht die Neuordnung Europas, die einen Raum freien sozialen und ökonomischen Aus ... a... more ... Gewiss geht die Neuordnung Europas, die einen Raum freien sozialen und ökonomischen Aus ... auf die Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, auf den Wieder aufbau des Kontinents unter der Federführung der USA zurück und etablierte sich durch Einrichtungen wie den ğ ...
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Theory and society, Jun 1, 2002
This article examines claims about the emergence of a ''triadic''world in whi... more This article examines claims about the emergence of a ''triadic''world in which political-economic blocs centered on Europe, the Asia-Paci¢ c area, and North America e¡ ect the regionalization of international space. The triadic vision can be situated in broader intellectual e¡ orts to de-naturalize the ''national''as the taken-for-granted expression of political-economic space. As analysts struggle to interpret the multiple processes associated with ''globalization,''sub-national, cross-national, and supra-national regions have ...
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Global Discourse
In this paper we examine the increasing criminalisation by states and the EU of citizen networks ... more In this paper we examine the increasing criminalisation by states and the EU of citizen networks that have mobilised across Europe for supporting migrants in transit. Through these transnational solidarity practices a sort of infrastructure of migrant support has been built. The paper focuses on 'crimes of solidarity' that have taken place in France and in Italy and argues that the criminalisation of individuals which build solidarity connections across borders paradoxically constitutes a radical challenge to Europe's principles of citizens' solidarity across borders. The infrastructure of migrant support enacts a form of Europeanisation of citizens' practices that states and local authorities try instead to undermine. The paper moves on by focusing on the ambivalences of the expression 'smuggling activities', which is increasingly being used to name individuals who help migrants to cross or to stay without making any economic profit from that. The essay ...
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The SAGE Handbook of European Studies, 2009
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Security Dialogue, 2014
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European Journal of Social Theory
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Environment & Politics C: Politics & Space, 2024
It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise o... more It is hard to imagine how deportation regimes could function without the threat or the exercise of force. Yet surprisingly a focus on forces and bodies, and more generally the question of corporeality, has rarely been foregrounded by migration scholars looking at deportation. Academic study of clandestine border crossing as well as detention abounds with descriptions and theorization at the level of the body. Why not deportation? Building on fieldwork with cantonal police units in Switzerland between 2015 and 2017, this paper calls for scholars of deportation to take corporeality seriously. We follow some of the corporeal practices implemented by state actors and related experts and authorities to understand how bodies feature in removal practices in terms of senses, feelings, affects, nerves, pulses, breathing. Violence overarches this scene, but it is by no means the whole story in the state's struggle for sovereignty and racialised removal, since we should equally register the other moves that are integral to deportation operations such as calming, monitoring, medicating, consoling, dressing, undressing, and inspecting. To overlook the corporeal is to risk producing an overly sanitized, cleansed, tidy depiction of deportation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Tintin Wulia: Secrets, 2023
This is a short essay I contributed to the exhibition catalogue Tintin Wulia: Secrets, curated by... more This is a short essay I contributed to the exhibition catalogue Tintin Wulia: Secrets, curated by Andrew Tetzlaff. You can see the catalogue online at
https://rmitgallery.com/digital/all/tintin-wulia-secrets-digital-catalogue/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Mobilities, 2024
This paper calls for greater attention to air deportation, defined as the multiple ways in which ... more This paper calls for greater attention to air deportation, defined as the multiple ways in which states utilize aviation systems for the purpose of expelling unwanted people under immigration and criminal law. Civil aviation is pivotal to the expulsion of people from the countries of the global North, yet scholars of deportation have rarely addressed ques- tions of aerial mobility. The paper makes two moves to centre aerial and carceral mobilities within the study of deportation. (1) Empirically, and taking the UK for its case material, it brings scholarly attention to one particular practice of air deportation: the phenomenon of charter flights. These are special operations on which there are no regular pas- sengers, just deportees who are out-numbered by Detainee Custody Officers and other authorities. (2) Conceptually, the paper develops three tools from this case to advance the study of carceral circuits and mobilities: custodial chains, affordances and encumbrances. By helping us better understand agonistic power relations, and by offering a con- textualized account of change attuned to the interplay of a variety of factors, these concepts can promote a more mobilities-attuned under- standing of deportation by plane. They can also help us better under- stand tension and transformation in carceral mobilities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
El Gobierno Como Problema (II), eds D. Chao and M. Del Valle, 2023
This is a Spanish translation of C. Gordon, M. Tazzioli and W. Walters, "Governmentality and bey... more This is a Spanish translation of C. Gordon, M. Tazzioli and W. Walters, "Governmentality and beyond: an interview with Colin Gordon" in W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (eds), Handbook of Governmentality, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2023, pp.136-155.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Viapolitics. Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion. Walters W., Heller C., Pezzani L. (eds), 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Handbook on Governmentality, 2023
Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose are three of the most original and influential t... more Wendy Brown, Partha Chatterjee, and Nikolas Rose are three of the most original and influential thinkers to have engaged with Foucault and governmentality. This chapter presents a conversation between these scholars on such questions as power, governmentality, populism, biopolitics, and methods and styles of critical inquiry.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Handbook on Governmentality, 2023
This chapter offers a conversation with Colin Gordon, a pioneering figure in the field of Foucaul... more This chapter offers a conversation with Colin Gordon, a pioneering figure in the field of Foucault and governmentality scholarship. This conversation explores a number of themes which include Gordon’s role in the landmark publication, The Foucault Effect, his thoughts on neoliberalism and post-Truth politics, his take on the emergence and character of governmentality studies, his view that Foucault’s work points us towards a genealogy of the political, and how our notions of politics and power (including governmentality) need to be updated to understand today’s present (including Brexit).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
antiAtlas Journal, 2022
This article examines anarchist struggles against deportation in France, reconstructing their fra... more This article examines anarchist struggles against deportation in France, reconstructing their fragmented history. We highlight the idea of a "deportation machine" that these campaigns popularized, and ask how these movements expand the field of political action beyond the state, entangling airlines, airports, travel agents, and other commercial actors in the struggle against deportation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This is the prepublication version of the Introduction to the book: State Secrecy and Security: R... more This is the prepublication version of the Introduction to the book:
State Secrecy and Security: Refiguring the Covert Imaginary (Routledge 2021).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
First developed by Michel Foucault more than thirty years ago, "governmentality" has become an es... more First developed by Michel Foucault more than thirty years ago, "governmentality" has become an essential set of tools for many researchers in the social and political sciences today. What is "governmentality"? How does this perspective challenge the way we understand political power and its contestation? This new introduction offers advanced undergraduate and graduate students both a highly accessible guide and an original contribution to debates about power and governmentality.
The book aims to serve four main functions:
- To situate governmentality as an intellectual development within Foucault’s thinking about the microphysics of power and his genealogical methods;
- To reveal how research in governmentality has changed as the idea encounters new academic fields, political contexts and regional settings;
- To examine one of the more recent encounters between governmentality and the social sciences - its interaction with international relations and global politics;
- To offer researchers some methodological suggestions for undertaking studies in governmentality, stressing that its critical edge becomes blunted if it is detached from historical/genealogical modes of inquiry.
This book offers a set of conceptual and methodological observations intended to keep research in governmentality a living, critical thought project. Above all, it argues that the challenge of understanding the world calls for the addition of new thinking equipment to the governmentality toolbox. Governmentality: Critical Encounters will prove useful for students of social and political theory, international relations, political sociology, anthropology and geography.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studies in Social Justice, 2018
Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship... more Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining the bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation of migratory processes. Yet the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. While Foucault was insistent that governmentality should orient itself to the understanding of singularities, too often race appears, when treated at all, as a general phenomenon. This article makes two contributions aimed at addressing these shortcomings. First, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts this scholarship. Second, we look to recent debates about race and racism in Science & Technology Studies for useful theoretical innovations that might help us study border-and race-making as mutually constitutive processes.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion, 2022
This is the introductory chapter to the book Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Lo... more This is the introductory chapter to the book Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion, published by Duke University Press, 2022. It can also be accessed here:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1428-7_601.pdf
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Biopolitik – in der Debatte, 2011
... Gewiss geht die Neuordnung Europas, die einen Raum freien sozialen und ökonomischen Aus ... a... more ... Gewiss geht die Neuordnung Europas, die einen Raum freien sozialen und ökonomischen Aus ... auf die Zeit nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, auf den Wieder aufbau des Kontinents unter der Federführung der USA zurück und etablierte sich durch Einrichtungen wie den ğ ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Theory and society, Jun 1, 2002
This article examines claims about the emergence of a ''triadic''world in whi... more This article examines claims about the emergence of a ''triadic''world in which political-economic blocs centered on Europe, the Asia-Paci¢ c area, and North America e¡ ect the regionalization of international space. The triadic vision can be situated in broader intellectual e¡ orts to de-naturalize the ''national''as the taken-for-granted expression of political-economic space. As analysts struggle to interpret the multiple processes associated with ''globalization,''sub-national, cross-national, and supra-national regions have ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Global Discourse
In this paper we examine the increasing criminalisation by states and the EU of citizen networks ... more In this paper we examine the increasing criminalisation by states and the EU of citizen networks that have mobilised across Europe for supporting migrants in transit. Through these transnational solidarity practices a sort of infrastructure of migrant support has been built. The paper focuses on 'crimes of solidarity' that have taken place in France and in Italy and argues that the criminalisation of individuals which build solidarity connections across borders paradoxically constitutes a radical challenge to Europe's principles of citizens' solidarity across borders. The infrastructure of migrant support enacts a form of Europeanisation of citizens' practices that states and local authorities try instead to undermine. The paper moves on by focusing on the ambivalences of the expression 'smuggling activities', which is increasingly being used to name individuals who help migrants to cross or to stay without making any economic profit from that. The essay ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The SAGE Handbook of European Studies, 2009
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Security Dialogue, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
European Journal of Social Theory
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact