The heart of the state: emotional and moral economies of migration policing

Join us for a public lecture by Professor Ana Aliverti as she explores the emotional and moral economies of migration policing in Britain.

1pm-2.30pm, Wednesday 11 October 2023

Business Lounge, Church Lane Building, Heslington, York, YO10 5ZF


In this lecture, Professor Aliverti will examine the contrasting and competing rationales, emotions and values that underpin the contemporary governance of marginalised groups.

Professor Aliverti will look at the example of migration policing in the UK, where immigration policies have added safeguarding and care for the vulnerable to the priority of detecting and ejecting illegal migrants. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with police and immigration officers since 2016, this lecture will explore how these officers navigate competing demands for care and control, and the moral tensions and dilemmas that arise in their everyday work.

This lecture is jointly hosted between the York Law School and the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre

About the speaker

Professor Ana Aliverti is Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. Her research work looks at the intersections between criminal law and criminal justice, on the one hand, and border regimes, on the other, and explores the impact of such intertwining on the national criminal justice institutions and on those subject to the resulting set of controls.

Ana is currently leading two projects: the first, with Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho, explores the ambivalent emotional and affective economies of state power in the governance of social marginality. Through empirical and legal methodologies, it traces the conflicting logics, emotions, and affects in the treatment of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains. The second project on border controls and humanitarianism, with Elisa García España and Roberto Dufraix, explores the conflicting demands of border work and the emotional and moral pains it creates on frontline staff.