Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on an instance of a group of Indian international students who sat on an 18 day protest in Toronto to refute their deportation orders, to reflect on how the migrant student movement in Canada is characterised by- in the context of ongoing collective action— a seeming nothingness.

Paper long abstract:

In the popular cultural imaginary, the term movement indicates an ontological orientation toward motion, a future horizon, and a goal imagined to be ahead of us. Instead, and in practice, what precisely constitutes a social movement and transformative political action is often borne out of vacillations and backsliding. This paper draws on an instance of a group of Indian international students who sat on an 18 day protest outside Pearson International Airport, Toronto to refute their deportation orders to reflect how the migrant student movement in Canada is characterised by- in the context of ongoing collective action— a seeming nothingness. Canada's higher education system is devised by a quicksand like policyscape that at once imagines international students as immigrants who will ease the country's ageing labour force and also casts them as "cheating actors" in the immigration regime. This paper will use ethnographic instances from the 18 day protest to locate how political outcomes don't always come from signature events associated with movements and struggles. Rather, in a policy regime that imagines international migrant students in constant flux between categories and migrant timelines, an exploration of possibilities is afforded by untimely adjacency through "unmovement". As a methodological intervention in the study of resistance, analytic attention where there is quiet, calm, and ostensibly little movement, pose a series of questions about how "unmovement" may in fact reveal the complexities of the political ecologies of activism and transformative social action.