What Is a Migrant? What Is a National Border?

What is a Migrant? What is a Border? Our typical responses focus on the movement of human persons across borders we understand as determined by nation-states. This talk will make the case for a different perspective, one that focuses on the transnational commercial corporation as both an especially consequential migrant, and as a fundamental determinant of the (inter)national border. With introductions and discussion moderated by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Michaeline Crichlow, and Paula Chakravartty

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Professor E. Tendayi Achiume (Stanford Law School) is an international legal scholar focusing on international human rights law, international refugee law and international migration law. Her academic research explores the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism and other forms of empire for the governance of international migration. In recognition of the "exceptional creativity" and "promise for important future advances," of Achiume's research in these areas, she was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "genius grant."

In November 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Achiume the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, making her the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993. Before joining Stanford Law, Achiume clerked for Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke and Justice Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Following her clerkships, she was awarded the Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship to work for the Refugee and Migrant Rights Project unit at Lawyers for Human Rights in Johannesburg.

Hosted by the Climate Change, Decolonization & Global Blackness Lab at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University and the Critical Racial Anti Colonial Study Co-Lab at NYU. Supported by a Josiah C. Trent Memorial Foundation Grant and co-sponsored by African and African American Studies, Black Archival Imagination Lab, and the Office of Global Affairs.