Speaker: Professor Devyani Prabhat (University of Bristol)
Chair: Lord David Lloyd-Jones (The Supreme Court)
About the lecture
The idea of aliens in the immigration context is widespread. The word ‘aliens’ is found in immigration and nationality legislation as well as case law in various countries including the UK and USA. Why is this so? Was it not sufficient to call ‘outsiders’ foreigners or non-citizens? What does this concept of ‘alien’ mean in nationality law? Are there many kinds of ‘aliens’? This lecture will look into the historical origins of the term and its subsequent conceptual development and impact on global migration through analysis of case law and archival material. It will also unpack the recent controversies in the use of the term ‘alien’ such as the efforts of the Biden administration to remove the word in US nationality processes as well as the use of the term in a pejorative manner in politics. Is this now an antiquated word reflective of past values which should become extinct in modern nationality and citizenship contexts or does it still have a pragmatic (or symbolic) purpose not quite served by other terminology? In the age of multiple-nationality and existing free/ permitted movement regimes, perhaps an alien is just one we are yet to encounter in outer space, but we mistake for one of our own shared humanity in the meanwhile. This lecture is the story of such human ‘aliens’ in nationality law.
About the speaker
Professor Devyani Prabhat is a Professor of Law at University of Bristol Law School, UK, with research interests in migration law and citizenship and with legal practice experience in constitutional law. She is an ESRC research project PI on British Citizenship and an AHRC project team grant holder on maternal/reproductive health care for minority and migrant women. She has written a number of monographs and edited works on citizenship and immigration law. Her monograph Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms (Palgrave Macmillan) won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars UK and Ireland). Her book with Policy Press, Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available at Open Access via this link). Her two most recent books are Children’s Rights, ‘Foreign Fighters’, Counter-Terrorism: Children of Nowhere (co-authored, Edward Elgar, September 2024) and Migrating Borders (University of London/University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2025).
She serves on the Executive Committee of the UK Society of Legal Scholars (re-elected for second term in 2022), the Advisory Board of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, and the editorial board of journals (e.g. Social and Legal Studies, Human Rights Law Quarterly). She is the Post Graduate Director at University of Bristol Law School, the Co-Director for the Centre for Socio-legal Studies (Bristol) and is the founder co-president of UK South Asian Legal Scholars Association (UKSALSA). She has served on ESRC and AHRC peer review colleges and as Associate Director of Border Criminologies (Oxford University) in the recent past.
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