Michelle McKinley

Michelle McKinley is an assistant professor of law at Oregon Law and a Wayne Morse Center Resident Scholar. She has published extensively on international law, human rights, reproductive rights, and immigration issues. Currently, she is engaged in groundbreaking research on race, gender and cultural citizenship. Professor McKinley's resident scholar project is titled Bringing in Outsiders: Cultural Citizenship in Refugee and Asylum Law. In that project, she critically examines a new generation of refugee litigation focused on gender and culture, using the legal ambivalence of the refugee to explore critical aspects of our debate on citizenship. Professor McKinley teaches Law, Culture & Society, Immigration Law, Public International Law, and Refugee & Asylum Law.

Abstract:
The Road Not Taken: Cosmopolitan Citizenship and Hospitality

The quintessential relationship between state and citizen relies on idealized bonds of allegiance, trust, loyalty, and protection. The severance of these bonds then gives rise to the status of refugeehood. This Article examines the relationship between refugee and asylum seeking status and cosmopolitan citizenship. I ask what cosmopolitanism as a normative project contributes to refugee and asylum law that remains unfulfilled by the current Westphalian system. I use the prism of statelessness to explore the commonalities between cosmopolitanism and nationalism with an emphasis on transnational theories of citizenship. My argument is that while citizenship is most commonly regarded as a territorially bounded concept, post-colonial citizenships are maintained through travel, pilgrimage, labor migration, forced upheaval, and complex residential patterns that traverse boundaries. This Article examines the affective ties of global, cosmopolitan citizenship and the impact of migration on international refugee and asylum law.