Abstract Nowhere is the contradiction between the promise of human rights and its selective realization more salient than with undocumented migrants, who are increasingly ‘illegalised’ and criminalized. Against this backdrop, we challenge the extant critiques of human rights—oscillating between enlightenment-fundamentalism and biopolitical fatalism—in favour of a more affirmative perspective that politicizes the gap between the ‘human’ and ‘citizen’. Concretely, we relocate the emancipatory potential of human rights from legal entitlements to processes of political subjectivation. Drawing on and intersecting Rancière’s political philosophy with insights from critical race theory, we conceptualize and illustrate how social work can support this process through a praxis of ‘(dis)identification’, ‘redistributing the sensible’, and ‘enacting radical equality’. Our analysis is grounded in ethnographic and participatory research on social work with undocumented migrants in Belgium, including medical humanitarian NGOs, ‘Associations where People in Poverty Raise their Voice’, and solidarity networks. We observed how social work reshapes ‘the political’ through concrete, relational engagements that contest the prevailing order and enact transformative possibilities. Although our study centres on the undocumented as subjects of this subjectivation, we develop a novel perspective that calls for a radical rethinking of rights-based, anti-oppressive, and politicized practice more broadly.
Boost et al. (Fri,) studied this question.