Lisa Ann Senecal is a PhD Candidate (Migrations, Anthropology) at ICS-ULisboa. Her research centers around the intersection of race, class, and migratory spaces. Her research focuses on antiracism, inequality, noncitizenship, representations, cultural transformation, and mobility justice as these concepts intersect within a regime of borders and/or in border spaces. 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 with an emphasis on noncitizen subjectivities – that is the actual experience of borders.
PhD Candidate: Migrations, Anthropology
Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon (UL)
Titled Mapping Malta: A Study of the Regime of Borders Through Structures and Noncitizen Subjectivities, her 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 fully understand 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.
Keywords: ethnography, regime of borders, Malta, human circulations, noncitizenship