As a highly bureaucratic procedure, migration is mediated and organised by institutional texts that inform and organise people's mobilities. From the initial stage of making the decision to migrate to the final stage of submitting the visa application and to the receiving of a visa, or not, applicants are enmeshed in institutional processes beyond their control. In order to bring to the fore the regulatory activities in policing mobility, this paper intends to map out the textual processes involved in the student visa applications of a group of Iranian women who are planning to leave for Canada. At each and every stage of the process, applicants are required to read, understand, and produce texts as part of their applications. The whole visa application process is extra-locally organized and mediated by means of texts. Starting from the standpoint of female visa applicants and their experience of having their mobility regulated, this paper undertakes to constitute and investigate their everyday world as 'problematic', i.e. it sets out to illuminate how their everyday world is constructed and determined by social processes beyond their control (G.W. Smith, 2014). Investigating authorized texts that are integral to the visa application process makes it possible to enter the governing regime of migration and to provide an account of bordering practices. As an illustration of how an institutional text is put together and to trace the discourses, work processes, and extra-local organizations that go into the creation of the text, by drawing upon my own personal experience as a subject of discriminatory regimes of migration and inspired by the work of G. W. Smith (2014), in this paper I aim to analyze the social organization of a visa rejection letter that I received from the Australian embassy in October 2015 two weeks after submitting my student visa application. Specifically, it is my intention to show how the political and economic positioning of 'Iran' and 'Iranian' in this document is rationalized and leads to specific categorizations which have significant implications for Iranians as visa applicants.
Smith, D. E. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, G. W. (2014). Policing The Gay Community: An Inquiry into Textually-Mediated Social Relations. In Incorporating texts into institutional ethnographies (pp. 17-40). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
