Kathleen Arnold is Director of the Refugee and Forced Migration graduate program. She also teaches courses on political theory (specializing in contemporary theory), immigration law, human rights, and political development and political economy in the Department of Political Science. She is committed to teaching from an intersectional perspective, including assigning texts that are critical of the philosophical canon, and centrist and/or “realist" approaches to international organizations. She often works with students on justice-oriented projects and is engaged in grassroots activity in the Chicago area, as well as serving as an expert witness in asylum cases.
Professor Arnold is the author of six books, two encyclopedia projects, and several articles and essays. Her work centers on issues of political sovereignty and critical analyses of public policy, but her main focus is on statelessness. She is interested in the democratic and justice-oriented questions that arise from the condition of statelessness which, following Hannah Arendt, Arnold finds to be endemic to the modern condition (rather than anomalous). She has examined American and European poverty, homeless policy, immigration, economic globalization, democracy, citizenship, and identity in her research and teaching. This work is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and historically informed drawing on literary theory, post-colonial theory, and legal theory.
Professor Arnold's 5th book, Arendt, Agamben, and the Issue of Hyper-Legality: In Between the Prisoner-Stateless Nexus , was published in 2018. This work is both theoretical and an exploration of the “crimmigration" system, which is the merging of the criminal justice system and immigration/refugee policy since the 1990s. She was inspired to write this book based on Hannah Arendt's famous claim that it is better to be a criminal than a stateless person. In her famous work on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that it was better to be a criminal than a stateless person during the interwar and World War II era. This was because the criminal, even though treated as an exception, still had a range of rights and was treated as a “person" before the law. In contrast, the stateless person was essentially a non-person and yet criminalized in such a way that s/he became an “outlaw." Like Arendt, Giorgio Agamben argues that the camp and not the prison, is the key institution of modern power in wealthier representative democracies. While the prison is built on legality, the camp is a geographical space that denationalizes national territory and suspends regular law. This book interrogates the hierarchical binaries suggested by each author (criminal-stateless and prison-camp), suggesting that both authors' works are relevant to the contemporary United States, but that the personhood of the Fourteenth Amendment suggests a different sort of relationship between the pairs suggested by these authors. Her research for this project has also been inspired by the very rich resources for immigration advocacy and policy in Chicago.
Her most recent book Migrant Protest and Democratic States of Exception investigates the sorts of protests occurring outside of a civil rights context. She examines the theoretical and practical concerns revolving around these two broad types of migrant resistance: (1) migrant detainees' self-harming protests, particularly hunger strikes and lip-sewing, and (2) faith-based sanctuary, which, she argues, is a protest form distinct from sanctuary localities. Investigating the material conditions of those who are no longer even “persons" before the law, she finds that these protests are highly effective enactments of “fugitive democracy" per Sheldon Wolin.
She has also recently published work on projects related to US faith-based sanctuary Sanctuary in a Trumpist Context: Creating Spaces of Democratic Exception - Kathleen R. Arnold, 2022 as well as Hannah Arendt's work: When the Nation Conquered the State: Arendt's Importance Today - Kathleen R. Arnold, 2023. She has recently been featured on Ali Velshi and on WBEZ: What does Chicago's sanctuary city status mean? - WBEZ Chicago and A Chicago professor and her students are helping migrants seeking asylum.
Dr. Arnold frequently collaborates with students on projects extending beyond the classroom and aims at fostering intellectual community and rigor.