The Extraordinary Statelessness of Deepan Budlakoti 7 with an increasing number of documents added to it” from different offices and bureaucracies, “the alchemy of legal decision making takes place” (Levi & Valverde, 2008, p. 817). Networks under ANT are regarded as “flows of translations,” referring to “all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence” by which an authority speaks or acts on behalf of another actor or force (Cowan & Carr, 2008, p. 152). They are mobile but also “hold patterns of links stable, at least for a period of time” (Cowan & Carr, 2008, p. 152). Participants in networks are active mediators as opposed to passive intermediaries, shaping the social, and “making it bifurcate in unexpected ways” (Latour in Cowan & Carr, 2008, p. 152). Documents or texts frequently feature as key actants within actor-network analysis, and legal-documental networks are often studied in socio-legal applications of ANT (Law, 1986; Grabaham, 2011). Given that many of the points of contention in the Budlakoti case involve interpretation of documents and their circumstances of production (e.g., the passports issued in bureaucratic “error,” the affidavits judged to be tainted by faulty memory, etc.), ANT, with its focus on the “agency” of material objects such as documents, is an attractive tool to analyze the particularities of this case. ANT explores the hows and not the whys of the social (Law, 2009, p. 148). In order to examine the reasons why Canadian authorities questioned and denied citizenship status to Budlakoti, it is additionally important to examine the racialization of processes of citizenship revocation and statelessness, and the securitization of immigration and citizenship policies through a critical race and intersectional lens.9 Statelessness in Canada As those who study statelessness both in Canada and internationally have observed, “data on statelessness is notoriously difficult to obtain and often unreliable” (Brouwer, 2012, p. 58). In the 2006 Canadian Census, 1,455 persons self-identified as “stateless” when asked to select their country of origin (Brouwer, 2012, p. 58). Despite the relatively small numbers of stateless in Canada (or born of Canadian citizens), there are pressing reasons to make the production of statelessness in Canada a focus of research, analysis and public awareness. First, there is evidence of statelessness in Canada and new policy innovations that increase the likelihood of statelessness. Second, Canada has made an international commitment to reduce future statelessness by virtue of having signed and (in 1978) ratified 9 Given the limitations of space in this article, the analysis of the racialized and intersectional dimensions of the broader context of social relations of power are treated here in a fairly cursory manner. Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017

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