6 Daiva Stasiulis useful methodology to study the social action and networks of socio-legal objects - especially legal documents such as passports, birth certificates, tribunal and court decisions and supporting documentation, and fundamental pieces of legislation such as the Canadian Citizenship Act, as they become entangled with human decision-making. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) was developed in the 1980s by science and technology studies scholars Bruno Latour and Michel Callon and sociologist John Law (Callon & Latour, 1981). ANT has since been utilized in many different fields, including socio-legal studies (Cloatre, 2008; Cowan & Carr, 2008; Grabaham, 2011; Levi & Valverde, 2008). As John Law points out, the actor-network approach is more of research method than a theory, grounded in empirical case studies, “a sensibility to the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world” (2009, p. 142). A distinctive and innovative contribution of ANT is its “posthumanism” that subverts dualisms such as “human and non-human, meaning and materiality, big and small, macro and micro, social and technical, nature and culture…” (Law, 2009, p. 147). Human actors and non-human objects, all positioned in a “network of heterogeneous materials,” are treated equally as “actants,” determinants of social interactions and outcomes (Law, 1992, p. 381). The effort to identify significant processes producing the deprivation of Budlakoti’s Canadian citizenship (thus minimally creating de facto statelessness) is guided by ANT and its illuminating applications in sociolegal studies .8 For one of ANT’s founders, Bruno Latour, law is a “network of people and things in which legality is not a field [with any sort of internal autonomy] to be studied independently” (Levi & Valverde, 2008, pp. 806, 818). Rather, law is “an attribute that is attached to events, people, documents and other objects when they become part of the decision-making process…” (Levi & Valverde, 2008, p. 818). Latour’s approach to law both records the “often stammering human interaction that produces law” that is obscured by the public and impersonal voice of law (Levi & Valverde, 2008, p. 814), and brings notice to the “materiality of legal cases,” whereby case files are compiled and put together with rubber bands, staples and paper clips, a fact that can affect court decisions (e.g., because pages might be missing, outdated “facts” are reiterated, etc.) (Levi & Valverde, 2008, p. 816). The network of relations among various documents (birth certificates, employment contracts, witness affidavits, etc.) that may be transformed into evidence for a case constitutes legality. Once a “file is sufficiently ripened – after, then he was excluded from birthright citizenship through “diplomatic exception” under paragraph 3(2)(a) or 3(2)(b) of the Citizenship Act, 1985 (Budlakoti v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration), 2015 FCA 139 para 10). 8 The practical difference in access to rights between de jure and de facto statelessness is often minimal. A de jure stateless person is one “who is not considered as a national by any State by the operation of its laws” (1954 U.N. Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons). A de facto stateless person is one who “without having been deprived of their nationality no longer enjoy[s] the protection and assistance of their national authorities” (quoted in Brouwer, 2012, p. 20). Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017