The Arrival of ‘Statelessness Studies’ While it is evident to many observers that the field has emerged, it is also true that this area of study is not yet fully defined, and the questions of which discipline should claim it, and which methodologies we should use to interrogate it, are appropriate ones for this symposium. My review of the literature suggests that a substantial portion of statelessness scholarship has been produced by the legal academy. 5 At the same time, some of the most influential thinking on statelessness can be traced back to Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, and significant contributions have been made to this field of study by political scientists, sociologists, and historians, to name a few. I will pause here to say that the question of where statelessness studies ‘belongs’ feels a bit ironic, and it is partially my discomfort with that question that has led me to propose that our community commits itself to the continued multi-disciplinary study of statelessness. My hope is that as statelessness scholars we will adopt an ethos of multi-disciplinary study explicitly, and I will explain why and then discuss some practical considerations in this regard. I suggest that there is a value to adopting an ethos of multi-disciplinarity as a community. Statelessness is a question of belonging. As a legal matter, a stateless person is not a national under the laws of any country, and the lived experience of many stateless persons is one of outsider or ‘alien.’ 6 While the community of scholars working on statelessness would prefer that everyone have a nationality, there is some recognition that statelessness is an inevitable feature of the current global order of nation states. 7 Our community holds as an ideal that stateless persons, who do not belong anywhere in a formal sense, enjoy human rights and dignity wherever they are. 8 Because the subject of our scholarly inquiry does not formally ‘belong’, I propose that we resist the desire to formally locate statelessness studies in any particular discipline. An ethos of openness and access, ideally accompanied by an ideal of egalitarianism, resonates with our collective project. Of course, it has practical benefits as well. A multi-disciplinary approach to statelessness studies necessarily involves the examination of a common problem from a variety of perspectives, through different methodologies. There is a clear benefit to eliciting all perspectives, challenging them or accepting them, observing as new ideas morph and evolve together, without excluding any of them as an outsider. As a field, I think statelessness studies would produce the greatest insights if scholars from all fields continued to work in parallel, and gather regularly to share our findings. For example, my field is law, and I have found it tremendously useful to hear from 5 6 7 8 I acknowledge that my literature review is likely influenced by my own discipline — the law, and as this piece will suggest, I would welcome a contrary view. For profiles of stateless persons, see Shaminder Dulai, ‘Stateless Voices’ (Web Page, 7 February 2015) <https://vimeo.com/statelessvoices>. Katja Swider, ‘Why End Statelessness?’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 195. Indeed, human rights advocates have long argued that the conception of nationality as ‘the right to have rights’ is flawed, because it is our human condition that brings with an entitlement to fundamental rights. See David Weissbrodt, The Human Rights of Non-Citizens (Oxford University Press 2008). 157