Elizabeth Colson Lecture - Severing relation: Haitian ‘criminal deportees'

The Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, is pleased to host the 2026 Elizabeth Colson Lecture.

Speaker: Associate Professor Jeffrey S. Kahn (University of California, Davis)

Title: Severing relation: Haitian ‘criminal deportees,’ torture, and the spatialized ethics of removal

Abstract:

Deportations are a means of formally severing relation between subjects and the body politic. The plausibility of deportation as a lawful, ethical act depends on a host of juridically constituted rules concerning what a polity is, who its members are, and under what conditions one can be excised from it.

In this talk, I argue that the legal machinery of deportation is one of the key sites in which we can see how law operates as an expressive, world-constituting embodiment of ethical commitment and a technology of abandonment—a form of state-authorized “letting die” that differs from intentional sovereign violence.

In the United States, the implementation of the Convention Against Torture and the removal of Haitians with criminal convictions to Haiti provides a chilling opportunity to explore the limits of these practices of severing relation. Approaching this jurisprudence through an anthropological lens, this talk will examine how law creates ethical geographies of connection and how its modes of severing relation insulate states from responsibility for state-sanctioned violence.

Speaker biography:

Jeffrey S. Kahn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Trained as a lawyer and anthropologist, his interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on borders, maritime worlds, and legal geography.

His first book, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019), examines how boat migration from Haiti to the United States during the last three decades of the twentieth century led to the development of new forms of legal activism, border governance, and oceanic policing that have remade the spatiality of the American nation-state. Islands of Sovereignty was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association, the Avant Garde Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association, the Isis Duarte Book Prize from the Latin American Studies Association, and the Book Prize of the American Political Science Association’s Section on Migration and Citizenship. Published in venues including Current Anthropology and Comparative Studies in Society and History, his recent and forthcoming articles explore questions of insurgent maritime mobility and the semiotics of racialization at play in securitized border zones.

Content note: Please note this lecture will include discussion of the treatment of Haitians in Haitian prisons, including issues that advocates argue constitute torture.

Photo 1: Jeffrey S. Kahn

Photo 2: National penitentiary mural, Haiti. Credit: Victoria Hazou/United Nations

Info: Lecture followed by a short Q&A.

Info: Informal networking drinks reception following the lecture.

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