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Domestic work in private households is, together with prostitution, the most significant employer of newly arrived female migrants. This thesis examines the phenomenon of the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the European Union, and begins to outline the challenges this poses to feminism, political theory and community organisations. At an empirical level it begins to map the employment of migrant women in domestic work in Europe, to describe the work they perform, their living and working conditions and their employment relations. At a theoretical level it is necessarily concerned with the inadequacy of conceptual tools designed to describe more "traditional" forms of employment (i.e. traditionally of concern to white male sociologists) or to describe the experience of "women" within the domestic sphere (i.e. the experience of white middle class women). The paid domestic worker, even when she does the same task as the wife/daughter/mother, is differently constructed, for she is expressing and reproducing the female employer's status by serving as her "foil". I argue that it is the worker's "personhood" rather than their labour power, which the employer is attempting to "buy". As well as labour cost and supply, racist stereotypes and the reproduction of such stereotypes are important in determining demand for domestic workers, and this results in a racist hierarchy which constructs some women as being particularly "suitable" for domestic work. Migrant domestic workers' relation to the state encourages and reinforces the racialisation of domestic work and personal dependence on employers. While the applying of employment contracts to domestic workers may seem to offer some way forward there are many difficulties associated with applying employment contracts to the private domain, both theoretically and in workers' real experiences.

This thesis sets out to explain a paradox: how is it that Romanian migrants voice a discourse of mutual avoidance and mistrust, when conationals' help underscores every level of their journeys? The argument proposed here is that, contrary to the dangerous naturalisation of Romanian suspicion under tropes of Balkanism, this sense of disunity is constructed everyday by a neoliberal configuration which transfers social security onto personal connections, but which precisely in doing so comes to turn connections into the idiom of voicing discontent. To illustrate this, the thesis draws upon a year of multi-sited fieldwork conducted with Romanian migrants in a North London neighbourhood, and in a Carpathian village. Situating their departure within a discussion of the country's tortuous post-socialist transition, I show how the sense that there was nothing left at home gave rise to the widely shared hope that anything was possible abroad. For many of those who left, however, hope was not a frictionless return to Europe, but a journey made possible only by Romanian acquaintances who were called upon, much like in the imaginary of socialist informal economies, to arrange housing, legal status, or work in the UK. It is at this intersection of hope and help, where the duty to care for others and the concern to engineer one's own mobility come to clash, that discontent also emerges. Focusing thus on the sociality of informal help which propels Romanian migrants' journeys, this thesis seeks to enrich the migration literature by reaffirming the figure of the migrant as a moral subject endowed at once with interest and affect. Looking at the formation of mistrust, another ambition of this project is to draw attention to the dangers of personalising mobility, in a political economic configuration where state-based social security is increasingly eroded.

This dissertation draws on fifteen months of fieldwork between Geneva, Australia, Fiji, and the Republic of Nauru, focusing on the explosive growth of the refugee as a global commodity. I do so by examining the outsourcing of refugee processing to a new industrial site, where migrant meets mineral in the manufacturing of new commodities. Nauru, the world's smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the country resurged on the back of the refugee industry by importing Australia's prospective maritime refugee populations. In the first part of the dissertation, I put together my theoretical framework, detailing the global industrial assemblage that has led the refugee to become so heavily saturated within daily life. Nauru's supply chain is entangled in the political potency of Australian consumer scares. In the golden age of raw material, but amid political populist appeal, anyone who makes their way by boat and claims to be a refugee in Australian territorial now excised waters is offshored to Nauru or Manus Island for refugee processing and resettlement. Throughout, I promote a critical approach to the study of the refugee economy, integrating refugee claimants as labour industrialists working to insert themselves into state economies within a landscape of structural imbalance. After outlining my theoretical framing, I explore the many procedures and techniques that modulate to Nauru's state-building effort as a phosphate turned refugee company town. Nauru has occupied a prominent place in the international news, but the landscape of refugee market production that takes place there is represented by legal critics and global media as an exception. There remains a tendency to suggest through anti-civilisational discourses that Nauru is rife with abuse. My research makes a rather different finding. By contrast, I argue that not only do Nauru's refugee operations operate to the peak of industrial best practice, but that Nauru's offshore refugees actually enhance the moral and financial economies of industry trading and manufacturing operations in other regions. I find that the key motivation for promoting this assumption is the biophysical properties of a mortal and highly moralised commodity. Resource entanglements form a narrative thread throughout the dissertation as I examine the specificities of Nauru's refugee industrial operations. I look at how mineral and migrant raw materials merge in the remaking of Nauru's social economy. Each chapter goes deeper into detailing the extractive consequences that have developed in Nauru from both industrial sectors, but particularly the country's latest manufacturing operations. I find that Nauru's latest resource curse is entangled in the consumptive habits of mainland social movements. I explore how Australian refugee activism plays a powerful role in stirring Nauruans' quotidian lives, and those of the country's human resource, as they vie collaboratively to export the refugee to the mainland. I conclude that the resource wars that develop around Nauru's latest manufacturing operations strengthen the offshore supply chain. Instead, activist campaigns reinforce the mainland consumer disinterest that leads to the extension of human trading economies into new consumption spheres. Based on the propensity for governments to outsource industrial operations, I suggest that alternative framings are necessary to combat the ease with which industrial processing modulates to new extraction sites.

The major concern of this thesis lies in the role of power in the negotiation of evangelical ‘orthodoxy’ in theology and practice within global evangelicalism. To investigate this question, I examine how the minority of Palestinian evangelicals in Israel-Palestine make sense of both their belonging to a ‘global’ evangelical faith community, as well as to the Israeli State, which the majority of evangelicals support uncritically. Palestinian evangelicals are an anomaly in a context in which many dispensationalist and Christian Zionist evangelicals understand the State of Israel as being divinely ordained for the ‘Jewish people’. The data which this thesis draws on was collected over nine months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Israel-Palestine, with a focus on Nazareth (between 2015 and 2016), as well as two years of textual research. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of encounters across difference (physical, and in media and text) between Palestinian evangelicals and predominantly North American and European evangelical visitors in Israel-Palestine, paying attention to processes of adaptation, mimicry, representation, curation, and resistance. The thesis explores the diverse subject-making of Palestinian evangelicals in light of dominant theological ideas and practices concerning Israel, as well as the context of Israel-Palestine itself. It examines how dominant evangelical theologies of Israel are curated and performed, for example in a living history museum of the first century, and the role of Palestinian evangelicals in these performances. It further explores how dominant theologies are resisted as cultural hegemony. Considering ‘Israel’ as both evangelical imagination as well as everyday reality for Palestinian evangelicals, the thesis discusses how the dimensions of ‘local’ and ‘global’ are imagined, co-produced, and circulated within global evangelicalism. Finally, the thesis demonstrates the unequal access to shaping ‘global’ evangelicalism between differently resourced evangelicals.

This dissertation quantifies fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels and glide-weakening of /ai/ for 6 African American and 6 Appalachian White Detroit females. One of the most significant empirical findings is that the African American speakers show consistent fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels and glide-weakening of/ai/in the pre-voiceless context, patterns which according to all but the most recent reports are characteristic only of White speakers. In contrast to Labovian treatment of vowel rotations in American English as largely structural and mechanical, with social factors having little influence on them, the proposed approach treats shifting vowel patterns as socially mediated and infused with local language ideologies. I argue that the Southern variant of /ai/ provides a crucial site for indexing ethnic and regional identity among participants while fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels does not; fronting of these vowels is apparently a global change, reported for varieties of English around the world. Another important difference between glide-weakened /ai/ and fronted back vowels is that the former does not show the lawful contextual conditioning of the latter. In other words, fronting is constrained by universal phonetic (i.e. internal) factors, but /ai/ glide-weakening is not. The Detroit African American speakers in this study have undergone a process of allophonic leveling that, while bringing their patterns into alignment with the Appalachian White speakers, indexes a strong contrast with the Midwestern Whites. External, rather than internal, factors conditioned this change. The migration of African Americans from the South to Detroit resulted in a massive upheaval and subsequent restructuring of their social and linguistic realities which resulted in the pre-voiceless diphthongal allophone of /ai/ becoming socially redundant. In the South, AAE pre-voiceless diphthongal /ai/ indexes an opposition with Southern White groups that use the variant, but it is no longer necessary for the Detroit AAE speakers to index this social opposition. Differentiation among different social and linguistic groups became salient following migration from the rural South to the urban Midwest, and these changes in social differentiation precipitated changes in language ideologies, language attitudes, patterns of use, and social indexing among speaker groups.

This thesis explores the life stories of four men who were deported from the UK to Jamaica following interaction with the criminal justice system. All four men, having moved as children, spent roughly half of their lives in the UK. For each of the men, deportation was lived as exile from home - from parents, partners, children and friends - and the thesis provides portraits of their lives in the UK and in Jamaica. In particular, it examines processes of criminalisation, illegalisation and racialisation as they interact to construct deportable subjects. This thesis asks what these life stories can tell us about the relationship between immigration control and racism. Fieldwork was conducted in Jamaica with deported persons, and in the UK with friends and family members. As such, this is an ethnography of absences and disjunctures. In the ethnographic portraits, themes of illegality, culture, gender, police racism, citizenship, and the legal construction of family life emerge, and reading the portraits together provides a rich account of racism in multi-status Britain. Ultimately, the thesis argues that immigration controls reconfigure race in the present. Moving from the UK to Jamaica, the thesis argues that borders produce racial meanings at local, national and global scales, because racial hierarchy is intimately connected to citizenship regimes and the differential mobilities they organise. Examining the racial work that borders do provides a historically specific account of race and racism, and one which centres the state. The thesis argues that even the most local of encounters, played out in particular lives, in specific times and places, are connected to the ordering of space, mobility and population through border regimes. It also argues that when challenging citizenship and border regimes, it is essential that we find new ways to theorise kinship. Based on detailed ethnographic portraits, this thesis provides a wide-ranging intervention into studies of race, migration and citizenship.

Amid broad consensus about the urgency of transforming and revitalizing the US labor movement, alternative labor organizations such as worker centers have emerged as community-based, experimental organizations aiming to address some of the perceived gaps and failures of the mainstream movement. The structures and ideological orientation of worker centers challenge the labor movement's decades-long entrenchment of top-down bureaucracy and its historical exclusion of people of color, women, and immigrants - the very people that worker centers organize. This dissertation uses ethnography and life histories to examine the possibilities and constraints of alternative labor organizing with a radical vision of social change, exploring labor campaigns carried out by the Brooklyn Worker Center and a diverse group of bakery workers in New York. BWC sought to overcome both the limitations of worker centers in building power and the weaknesses of the mainstream labor movement by pursuing a model based on 'solidarity unionism', a current-day form of syndicalism that centers the principles of solidarity, direct action, and worker leadership within its long-term vision of worker control. Through an affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), BWC was seeking to unionize workers without using elections or aiming for contracts, but instead relying on worker solidarity and ongoing direct action. Documenting the struggle to manifest this radical vision within the reality of our existing political economic terrain, this study reveals a disjuncture between the Brooklyn Worker Center's vision and its practice, particularly evident in the organization's struggle to foster sustained worker participation in its campaigns and cultivate an active, growing, and militant organization of workers on the shop floor. I argue that this discrepancy between vision and practice was caused by the organization underestimating the challenges of transitioning from an advocacy-centered model to a model rooted in sustained workplace organizing. This transition is traced across multiple scales of analysis in the dissertation, weaving between BWC's organizational vision and strategies and the experiences of the bakery workers both inside and beyond the workplace. Beginning with a framework that traces the structural formation of the working class along hierarchies of labor, the analysis moves to workers' subjective experiences of these hierarchies and imagined possibilities for change, to the moral economy of the shop floor at an industrial bakery. I explore how BWC's organizing strategies strove to help workers prefigure the union through building 'structures of solidarity', seeking to activate workers' sense of justice and to expand their sense of what was possible; meanwhile, the employer sought to reassert maternalism and diminish imagined possibilities. Yet as these workers faced the triple threat of limited structural bargaining power, divisions in the workplace and precarity beyond the workplace, BWC was unable to position the union as a viable source of justice and security. Ultimately, the organization's ambitious, radical vision of worker power was not matched with sufficient organizing capacity to overcome the challenges and divisions; while the organization succeeded in leveraging external sources of power to win certain demands, the cultivation of worker solidarity and internal power faltered. This case study speaks to the inherent challenges of organizing marginalized workers, and draws our attention to the need to attend to the cultivation of workers' bargaining power and their ‘internal power' - a balance far more difficult to achieve in practice than in principle.

This thesis explores the normative propriety of immigration detention in liberal states. In the first part of the thesis, I explore the development, current practice, and popular justifications for immigration detention in the United Kingdom. I argue that a crucial but unacknowledged role for immigration detention is to function as a political spectacle of the centralisation of power in liberal states. I find that the key motivation for detaining non-citizens is that they could abscond before their removals. I conclude that this basis for detention is normatively acceptable in only very limited cases and, even then, alternatives are often available and ethically preferable. Based on the fact that there is a normatively acceptable rationale, albeit circumscribed, for detention practices, I then propose a framework of minimum standards of treatment in detention that I advise all liberal states to follow. After outlining my proposal, I turn in the second part of the thesis to an examination of the normative theories of immigration control and how they take account of detention. Normative theorists differ in how they balance their commitments to individual and state rights, yet I find the majority concedes the need for some degree of immigration admissions control. Such theories face a moral dilemma: there can be no immigration control without detention, and so detention becomes an implicit assumption for these normative theories to be coherent. A potential solution for combating the practical problems associated with the growing, worsening detention estates as well as the moral dilemma of incarcerating a non-citizen based on fear of absconding would be to open borders and eliminate immigration control. Given the reality of the sovereign right to control immigration, however, I argue that the more feasible normative answer is lobby liberal states to adopt my framework of minimum standards of treatment while simultaneously pressing for open borders as the long-term ethical goal.

This thesis offers a critical assessment of anti- child trafficking discourse, policy and practice, using a case study of the situation in Southern Benin. It seeks to achieve two main goals. First, to transcend the reductiveness of the dominant paradigm around child trafficking, including dominant representations of it and prevailing policy approaches to dealing with it. Second, to complicate the simplistic nature of much of the academic literature that explains the existence and persistence of this dominant paradigm. Based on 14 months of multi-sited fieldwork, the thesis demonstrates, first, that the institutional narrative of ‘child trafficking’ misrepresents what would be better understood as adolescent labour migration in Benin, and second, that mainstream policy approaches to tackling this fail to account for the sociocultural or political-economic conditions that underpin it. The thesis suggests that this can be interpreted as a result of the power of three framing orders of discourse – ‘Apollonian Childhood’, Neoliberalism and that of the Westphalian State – which structure both what ‘trafficking’ can mean and what can be done about it. The thesis suggests that the material and power structures of the anti-trafficking discourse- and policy-making field are such that, even where individuals within it reject both the dominant paradigm and its (and the field’s) framing orders of discourse, little space exists for them to construct meaningful alternatives. The result is a degree of formal and representational stability, hiding practical hybridity. The conclusion is offered that, while anti-trafficking discourse is presumed to be accurate and while antitrafficking policy is justified in terms of its contribution to ‘beneficiaries’, theprinciple achievement of both is the depoliticised reproduction of the institutions, orders of discourse and political-economic context within which they are constructed.