Brad Erickson

I am concerned with the problem of the fraught social spaces of encounter brought about by global migration. Broadly, I ask what congeries of history, public reasoning, techniques of sociality, and policy feed momentum toward host-immigrant polarization or toward forms of pluralism. I examine the ways lived dynamics between hosts and newcomers are both shaped by and fugitive to the state’s liberal democratic norms and investigate how local ethical-aesthetic sensibilities may militate against xenophobic impulses, and also overrun liberal paradigms of tolerance, diversity or multiculturalism. My field of inquiry encompasses language practice, religion and ritual, embodied sociality, discourses about community and civil society, and state and local policies.