This article analyses the (post)colonial politics of UK bordering through the lens of monstrosity. Historicising contemporary bordering within colonial-era monsterisations of racialised people and their mobility, we identify four mechanisms through which migrants are constructed and policed as monsters today: animalisation, zombification, criminalisation, and barbarisation. We then examine how the state embodies monstrosity itself through border policies of deterrence and creating ‘hostile environments’. In addition to the instrumentalisation of horror, this entails extending the border’s reach domestically throughout everyday life and internationally through deportation and externalisation measures. We argue these developments embody a new form of state power, depicted as a headless, tentacled Leviathan. Doing so provides insights into monstrosity as a form of liberal statecraft, the local/global diffusion of bordering, the transnationalisation of sovereign power, and the racialisation of citizenship. It also raises important questions about the construction of border violence as a necessary and legitimate monstrosity in (post)colonial liberal societies, the everyday complicity of citizens, and the limits of efforts to humanise monsterised migrants or reform monstrous state institutions. Revealing how within liberal regimes of citizenship and humanitarianism values ‘there be monsters’, we argue, opens space for thinking about abolitionist alternatives in international politics.

Critical and feminist ageing scholarship has drawn attention to how dominant discourses of ageing negatively impact older women's identities and social lives. While research intersecting migration and ageing has broadly focused on older immigrants' settlement experiences, very little is known about the discursive influences over older immigrant women's sense of agency and social relations. To address this knowledge gap, this study explores the subjectivity-formations of older South Asian Muslim women engaged in transnational migration. Narrative and discourse analysis principles were used to conduct and analyse life story-based interviews with 15 South Asian Muslim older women who recently migrated to Toronto, Canada. Findings indicate that participant subjectivity-formations are shaped by: (a) discourses of ageing; (b) socio-cultural–religious discourses; and (c) discourses of transnational migration. In response, participants engaged in dynamic strategies including conforming, negotiating, creating alternative narratives and/or resisting these discourses to organise their lives. These findings reinforce the continued need to trace the governmentality of structural conditions over ageing migrant women's lives and their responsive strategies to manage these impacts.

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

The predominance of Whiteness, and the corresponding lack of representation of people who are both racialized and minoritized, in the governance of universities is a political issue. We present the results from an intersectional diversity audit of central and senior academic administrators at five Canadian universities: Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Victoria and York University. Our findings indicate that racialized men and women are hitting ceilings in the middle administrative ranks. Conversely, we find a notable overrepresentation of White men and women in the senior administrative ranks. Our analysis suggests that White women, unlike racialized women and men, no longer face serious barriers to representation within these senior ranks. These findings raise concerns about processes of racialization that may impede career progress for some but accelerate it for others. They raise concerns about the politics of who lifts whom into the echelons of academic decision making, which in turn has implications for justice, knowledge and social meanings of competency.

This paper closely studies Scotland v Canada to reveal the normative and substantive justice challenges facing immigration detainees across Canada. The Scotland decision at the Ontario Superior Court certified a habeas corpus writ as an individual remedy to release Mr. Ricardo Scotland from a pointless, seventeen-month incarceration. The decision frames Mr. Scotland’s detention as anomalous or divergent from an otherwise-functioning system. Against this view, this paper argues that access to habeas corpus cannot remedy the detention system’s scale of injustices. The paper contextualizes Mr. Scotland’s incarceration and the Superior Court decision against two primary claims: first, that the Canadian immigration and refugee determination system is arbitrarily biased against certain minoritized individuals, therefore transforming some people into detainable bodies; and second, that the global criminalization of migration trend has nested an arc of penal practices into Canadian policymaking and law, and this arc has seemingly normalized indefinite detention for some migrants. The paper concludes that restoration of access to habeas corpus cannot be understood as a substantive remedy to address the miscarriages of justice in the Canadian detention system.

The article considers the temporary labour migration program in Canada, which catapults workers from the global South into work and wider relations in the global North, in the context of debates swirling around Anglo-American labour law. There is widespread consensus that labour law is experiencing a sustained moment of crisis in the face of neoliberal globalization. Not widely considered is how this crisis relates to temporary labour migration and the global South-North relationship and, in turn, how this relationship may impact emergent approaches tasked with transforming or transcending the field. Critical interventions seeking to confront the “southern question” within the socio-legal imaginary have gone largely unnoticed by labour law scholars. Transnational labour law may hold potential for an alternative account of the racialized production of unfree migrant labour. But only if its adherents can truly confront the dynamic unfolding through temporary labour migration—that of the “South of the North.”