Spirited Away: Institutionality, the IRB and the case of MVJ, LLM thesis McGill University (2007)
This thesis deals with the same case considered below, only in far more detail. It operates on three levels. First, it elaborates something of the life of the person whose case I had before me, the trials she faced both in Sri Lanka and Canada. Second, and most significantly, it observes the effect of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada on the telling of her story, its particular adjudicatory techniques. It is concerned with how this particular institution “thinks”. Third and finally, it gestures at some possible implications of this analysis in institutional terms. At its most abstract this thesis argues that institutionality is a key feature of the adjudicatory project which is too frequently overlooked.
You can download a copy here.
Spirited Away: Asylum law and the Institutional Violence of Legal Discourse, Law Text Culture, Vol. 11, pp. 231-251 (2007)
This paper takes the case file of a Sri Lankan asylum seeker found in the archives at the Federal Court of Montreal in March 2007 and submits it to a textual analysis. Starting with the “facts” as stated in the Judicial Review decision, the analysis works backwards through the rest of the file, uncovering the various discursive processes by which those “facts” were eventually arrived at. The violence done to this person’s story by the legal institution is not only patent but, it is claimed, representative. Legal discourse, and not just in the context of asylum law, is more motivated, more political and more dehumanizing than we like to admit.
The paper derives from my presentation at the 13th International Conference of the Law and Literature Association of Australia in Melbourne in July 2006 and covers substantially similar ground to that of my thesis, though in distilled form.
It is available to download from the Social Science Research Network here.