My name is Lisa Senecal. I am a mother, a migration researcher and a footballer (soccer player for my American friends or friends who get confused when I use this word, knowing I am American). When I am not reading, writing, playing, walking in the woods or watching my daughter play sports or music, you can probably find us in salt water. Floating and splashing in the waves is my favorite way to be in nature.
This site was created by me, Lisa Ann Senecal. I am a PhD candidate (Migrations, Anthropology) at ICS-ULisboa. My 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, my 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.
My dissertation is titled Counter-mapping Malta: A study of the regime of borders through structures and noncitizen subjectivities. I aim 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 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.
deconstructing b/orders. 