Amy Shuman and Bridget Haas (Case Western University) received a grant of $16,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research to hold a workshop titled “Political Asylum and the Politics of Suspicion,” to be presented in March 2015 at The Ohio State University.

This workshop engages with the politics of suspicion that increasingly informs policies and processes of political asylum across the globe. There is a growing body of research highlighting inconsistencies and inequalities in political asylum procedures at the local level. This workshop contributes to this body of scholarship yet importantly expands this inquiry to also interrogate the broader political ambivalences about international policy, border security, and humanitarianism that sustain and reproduce such inequitable and flawed systems of asylum. More specifically, this workshop will explore the impact of the politics of suspicion on political asylum systems by bringing into dialogue two levels of analyses: asylum hearings/adjudicative processes, on the one hand, and larger state and international policies and debates about immigration, protection, and security, on the other. The workshop brings together international scholars of political asylum from different anthropology subfields (linguistic, political/legal, medical/psychological) as well as scholars working in folklore, law, communications and cultural studies. Engaging theoretically with the concepts of suspicion, denial and refusal in the context of political asylum systems, this workshop aims to elucidate the specific practices, interactions, moral dilemmas, and discourses deployed in the production of particular asylum applicants as suspect and, often, subsequent ‘failed asylum seekers.’