After Exile: Migration under Conditions of Punishment

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 1

Abstract

This paper advances a carceral approach to migration and place by theorizing how punitive governance reshapes the conditions of migrant social reproduction. Building on scholarship on migration and settlement (e.g., Sassen; Glick Schiller), critical carceral studies (e.g., Wacquant; Gilmore), and work on informal survival economies (e.g., Bourgois; Anderson), the article introduces exilic space as an analytic for understanding how displaced populations organize mutual aid, governance, and belonging beyond formal institutions under conditions of constraint.

The article argues that carcerality governs migrant life not only through exclusion, detention, or deportation, but through the reorganization of place itself. Policing, incarceration, parole, and institutional withdrawal fragment social density, interrupt leadership and intergenerational transmission, and transform durable infrastructures of informal life into unstable, episodic practices. Rather than eliminating informal social formations, punitive regimes force them to mutate—shifting from territorially anchored institutions to circulatory, precarious forms of endurance.

Drawing on ethnographic and historical analysis, the article shows how contemporary migration unfolds within urban landscapes already shaped by prior cycles of punishment. New migrant populations encounter neighborhoods structured by carceral dispersal and institutional erosion, compelling place-making to occur on thinner ground. Informal economies, social networks, and symbolic practices persist, but without the spatial stability that once enabled collective autonomy.

The article contributes to migration and urban sociology by reconceptualizing place as a dynamic field produced through punishment and displacement, and by extending carceral theory beyond confinement to the spatial and biological conditions under which migrant social life is reproduced or exhausted.

Author

• Lucas Ernesto Lopez-Arrastia, Florida International University