The Centre for European and Public Law and the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship (SPAIS) will host Dr Dagmar Myslinska, Associate Professor at Creighton Law School. She will talk about her monograph, “Law, Migration and the Construction of Whiteness: Mobility within the European Union” (Routledge, 2024).

The monograph interrogates the history, wording, omissions, assumptions and applications of laws, policies and discourses pertinent to mobility and equality, to argue that the parameters of Central and Eastern European nationals’ status within the EU have been closely circumscribed, in line with the entrenched historical positioning of the west as superior to the east. Engaging current legal, economic, political, and moral issues—against the backdrop of Brexit and contestations over EU integration and globalization—the book opens avenues of thought to better understand law’s role in producing and sustaining social stratifications. Europe is a postcolonial space, as this book demonstrates. By addressing fractures within the construct of whiteness that are based on ethnicity, class and migrant status, the book also provides a theoretically nuanced, and politically useful, understanding of contemporary European racisms.