‘All my friends here are ghosts’: everyday geo-legalities in a rural poultry town.

In recent years, feminist legal geographers have pressed for deeper engagement with the lived experience of law’s spatial logics including methodologies that extend beyond the study of legal discourse, practice, and enforcement to include ethnographic and other qualitative approaches that centre the experiences of those living with legal precarity. Building upon the work of feminist political geographers concerned with intimacy geopolitics, the concept of everyday geo-legalities emphasizes the ways that people interpret the spatiality of law, legal practice, and state policing and how it affects their lives, livelihoods and im/mobilities. This research reveals how undocumented im/migrants in a small, rural poultry town interpret and socially negotiate their racialized legal status in terms of im/mobility, heighted workplace pressure, increased job-related health risks, persistent fears of immigration raids, family separation and deportation, and prejudice and policing due to discourses of racialized criminalization. Social and familial relations, however, are central to the everyday negotiation of these dynamics, as community connections and care emerge from experiences of marginalization. This paper thus emphasizes how social relations are central to analysing the complexities and contradictions of everyday legal geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]