Marie Kondo-ing through Law: How law creates foreignness

Examining legal provisions and cases, this talk will illustrate how law tries to 'tidy up' human connections and relationships across borders affecting people, often inter-generationally, and thereby creates foreignness. While there are large junctures of categorical exclusion (Brexit for EEA nationals or Commonwealth nationals in the 60s/70s), there are also continual efforts to organise national borders that create degrees of foreignness for those living within national borders. 
 
Professor Devyani Prabhat is a Professor in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK, with legal practice experience in Constitutional law. She holds a LL.M and a PhD re from New York University and is an Attorney at Law, New York. She researches and teaches Migration, Citizenship and Nationality from a socio-legal and comparative perspective. She serves on the Executive Committee of the UK Society of Legal Studies.

Professor Prabhat's book Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms (Palgrave Macmillan Socio-legal Studies Series) has won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars). The book was shortlisted by both the Society of Legal Scholars (2017) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2016) for book prize awards. Her book on British Citizenship with Policy Press (2018) titled Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available open access here.

Professor Prabhat works closely with practitioners and civil society actors in a number of countries. for e.g., she has edited a book on British Citizenship (Elgar:2019) which is based on academic-practitioner collaborations in the field of immigration law and two books on privatisation of immigration control (Emerald 2021). She is an ESRC research grant holder on British Citizenship and the Practice of Nationality laws (2014-2017). The project focused on the processes of gaining, holding and losing of citizenship and the role of nationality law practice for long term residents or British citizens. She supervises doctoral students researching on citizenship, migration, children's rights, human rights, and the legal profession.