Dr Katie Tonkiss
Senior Lecturer, Society and Politics
- Birmingham UNITED KINGDOM
Katie researches citizenship, noncitizenship and belonging, focusing on statelessness and the lived experience of noncitizenship.
Media
Biography
Katie’s first book (2013) explored national identity and post-national citizenship in the context of intra-EU migration. She has since co-edited two volumes, Theorising Noncitizenship and Understanding Statelessness, and her research has appeared in leading journals including Citizenship Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. It has been funded by the British Academy, the European Commission and, most recently, the Economic and Social Research Council.
Most recently, Katie has written a book (forthcoming, Manchester University Press) examining citizenship in the context of international surrogacy, and her current research agenda is focused on noncitizenship in more-than-human worlds, extending debates about embodied political membership beyond human-centred frameworks.
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Migration rights and policy narratives grant, British Academy
2015
Education
University of Birmingham
PhD
Political Science and International Studies
2012
Links
Media Appearances
Paddington gets a British passport – but the Home Office treats real refugees very differently
The Conversation online
2024-11-04
To say that Paddington Bear is a beloved British icon would be something of an understatement. The Peruvian bear, who arrived at Paddington station with nothing but his suitcase, a love of marmalade sandwiches and a luggage tag reading “please look after this bear”, was created by Michael Bond in the 1958 classic A Bear Called Paddington.
Through its immigration policies, the UK government decides whose families are ‘legitimate’
The Conversation online
2023-12-15
Amid another panic over high net migration to the UK, the government and new home secretary James Cleverly have proposed several changes to visa rules. The proposals apply to economic migrants, rather than other kinds of migrants such as asylum seekers, and have particular consequences for families.
The Clamour of Nationalism... In Conversation with Sivamohan Valluvan
Aston Originals online
2022-07-01
Join Katie Tonkiss, senior lecturer in sociology at Aston University, for the Centre for Migration and Forced Displacement’s (CMFD) first podcast.
Spiderman of Paris shows the superhuman demands placed on migrants to earn their citizenship
The Conversation online
2018-05-30
Video footage of a man in Paris scaling four floors of a building to save a child dangling from a balcony has gone viral. The man, Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old undocumented migrant from Mali, arrived in France only a few months ago following a perilous journey through countries including Burkino Faso and Libya and across the Mediterranean. His seemingly superhuman rescue earned him the nickname “the spiderman of the 18th” after the district in Paris where this act of heroism took place.
History offers Britain an important lesson on shutting down immigration
The Conversation online
2016-09-26
Both in the 1960s and now, the UK encouraged immigration, failed to manage it properly and then tried to deconstruct free movement arrangements. The question now has to be, where does the UK go from here? And there are some important clues in history.
Articles
Loners, Criminals, Mothers: The Gendered Misrecognition of Refugees in the British Tabloid News Media
Sociological Research Online2022
Misrecognition has been conceptualised as an act of recognition that is ‘distorted’ or ‘incomplete’, and can be used to capture the differentiated experience of social and/or political phenomena by different individuals. In this article, we apply the concept of misrecognition to the visual representation of refugees in the British tabloid news media. The article presents a novel two-step analysis which combines visual analysis of a representative sample of British tabloid newspaper coverage of refugees with an analysis of a representative sample of this coverage by two focus groups of tabloid newspaper readers. In taking this approach, we capture the role of audiences in constructing the meanings of the images, a perspective largely absent from the literature to date. The findings show that a gendered misrecognition shapes the visual construction of refugees by this media and its audience, with women more likely to be recognised as refugees and (mis)recognised as vulnerable mothers, and men more likely to be misrecognised as loners and criminals and less likely to be recognised as refugees. Reflecting on the findings, we argue that misrecognition is a critical concept in understanding the politics of marginalisation constructed by the tabloid news media.
'A Baby Is a Baby’: The Asha Protests and the Sociology of Affective Post-Nationalism
Sociology2021
Theories of post-nationalism are concerned with deconstructing the relationship between citizenship and national identity. While literature in this field has tended towards macro-institutionalist analysis, recent research has re-articulated post-nationalism as micro-level practice. This article builds on this development by attending to the ‘affective conditions’ of such micro-political practices. The article draws on research into protests in Brisbane in February 2016 to prevent ‘Asha’, a child seeking asylum, from being returned to offshore detention. The analysis of this case demonstrates that affect performs a dual function in the practice of post-nationalism, to catalyse action in solidarity with the noncitizen informed primarily by the emotional resonance of a particular rendering of vulnerability, and in re-imagined solidarity with the co-citizen around a post-national community of feeling. Informed by this analysis, the article highlights the complex and fragile nature of a post-national solidarity dependent on intersecting, overlapping and at times problematic, affective conditions.
Cultural education and the good citizen: a systematic analysis of a neoliberal communitarian policy trend
Social Policy Review 32: Analysis and Debate in Social Policy2020
Locating the post-national activist: migration rights, civil society and the practice of post-nationalism
Ethnic and Racial Studies2019
Theorists of post-nationalism examine the (re)configuration of national identity, membership and rights. Yet while normative scholarship has conceptualized post-nationalism as an ongoing practice of discursive contestation over the role of national group membership in liberal democratic societies, more empirical studies have tended to overlook these features to predominantly focus instead on top-down legal and political institution-building as evidence of post-nationalism. In this article I argue in favour of an empirical conceptualization of post-nationalism which more effectively captures micro-level practices of discursive contestation. Specifically I posit that post-national activists, or actors engaging in post-national practices of contestation from within the state, are a key focus of analysis for scholars of post-nationalism. I develop this claim through the analysis of data collected with individuals working on civil society campaigns for migration rights in Europe, Australia and the USA who – I demonstrate – embody many of the characteristics of the post-national activist.