Recipient for 2022

Lisa Senecal is a PhD candidate in (Migrations) at ICS-UL. She holds a Master’s in Education from the City College of New York in Manhattan and a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights from the United Nations Mandated University for Peace in El Rodeo, Costa Rica. Her research converges around the intersection of race, class and migratory spaces – with the concepts of (anti)racism, (in)equality, (non)citizenship, hierarchies and mobility justice as focal points. By centering the Mediterranean/European/North-South continuum, her project aims to map the Maltese border by teasing apart structural aspects of the border from its embodied aspects, by emphasizing the actual experience of borders through a reliance on noncitizen subjectivities. 

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Titled Mapping Malta: A Study of the Regime of Borders Through Structures and Noncitizen Subjectivities, Lisa’s thesis aims to disentangle constructed aspects of the regime of borders in Malta from those which are experienced by the noncitizens who engage them. Using border ethnography as a tool to define both physical and conceptual spaces of engagement, it addresses the construction and enforcement of border structures and how they are experienced and negotiated to understand more deeply their function, purpose and consequences. This novel approach aims to illustrate how border regimes (re)produce hierarchies of value that have direct consequences on the trajectories and opportunities of the noncitizens who traverse borders. Through the experiences of a diverse group of noncitizens, it reveals how power works in context and how hierarchies are (re)constructed and (re)produced.