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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses settings of migrant-targeted care that are organized around biopolitical modes of risk assessment in Melbourne, Australia. It examines how direct service practitioners learn to produce truths about migrant familial relations through nationalist imaginaries of good citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses institutional settings of migrant-targeted care that are primarily organized around biopolitical modes of risk assessment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne Australia, and in the wake of a 2013 federal law outlawing forced marriage that disproportionately targeted Muslim migrant communities, I examine how direct service practitioners, through undergoing scenario-based trainings, are taught to produce standardized truths about who the typical victim of a forced marriage is. More specifically, I analyse how family violence case workers learn to interpret scenario fact patterns to determine migrant women’s risk of coercion into marriage. By examining how practitioners move from discussions of the scenario itself to discussions of migrant assimilation, I show that scenario trainings are powerful pedagogical spaces that sediment moralizing narratives about Australian citizenship and migrant deviance. Borrowing from Lakoff and Collier’s notion of the sentinel subject (2013) and Reva Jaffe-Walter’s concept of ‘figured identities’ (2015), I argue that scenario trainings treat migrant women as sentinel figures, whose familial relations prefigure their trajectory toward good or bad citizenship. In doing so, such trainings also function to assess how migrant marital practices deviate from settler nationalist paradigms of healthy family relationships. In introducing the concept of the sentinel figure, the paper begins to think about how anthropological theories of risk and threat, which have tended to emerge from studies of biosecurity, militarization, and war can be useful to understanding the governance of migrant behavior in spaces of care and social welfare.