Invitation to the Defense of Henrie Dennis

The Examination Panel is made up of: Univ. Prof. Dr. Sabeth Buchmann (chair),  Univ.-Prof. Dr.Phil. Marina Grzinic Mauhler (supervisor), Univ. Prof. Dorit Geva, PhD (external appraiser).

The defense will take place in English in room M20 at the Academy.

Abstract

This doctoral research critically examines how European border and asylum policies in Austria use racialized and gendered language to reproduce and sustain a regime of whiteness. By interrogating the linguistic and bureaucratic mechanisms embedded in these policies, the study reveals how the asylum system, under the guise of neutrality, reinscribes colonial hierarchies, constructing non-white, non-heteronormative bodies as subjects of suspicion and control.

Distinguishing between policies as juridical instruments and politics as the field of negotiation and power, the research employs critical discourse analysis to examine the epistemic and material violence inscribed in state language. It argues that the bureaucratic demand for coherence among identity, narrative, and evidence forces queer African migrants to translate their complex selves into categories legible to Western epistemologies. This compulsory self-performance becomes a site of epistemological violence, compelling individuals to inhabit the linguistic and ontological frameworks of whiteness to gain recognition and protection.

Methodologically, the dissertation centers on oral histories of queer African migrants as forms of epistemic resistance. Oral testimony is theorized not as supplemental data but as a decolonial mode of knowledge production that contests the Eurocentric archive by privileging affect, memory, and embodied experience. Through nine in-depth conversations and one auto-ethnographic contribution, the research shows how state-sanctioned procedures of identification and verification generate new regimes of trauma and exclusion while simultaneously inspiring acts of resilience, resistance, and world-making.

The theoretical foundation draws from Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic critique of coloniality, Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, bell hooks’s feminist analysis of whiteness, Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of institutions, Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands, and Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics. Together, these frameworks expose the European border as both a spatial and epistemic apparatus, a site where racialization, gender, and sexuality are regulated to preserve whiteness as sovereign order.

Ultimately, this transdisciplinary dissertation proposes a philosophical reimagining of the border through the lens of radical inclusivity. It articulates the Black body not only as an object of policy but as a method and subject of thought—one that offers alternative grammars of being, belonging, and knowing. By dismantling the discursive power of whiteness in migration regimes, this research calls for an ethics of decolonial border politics grounded in recognition, justice, and relationality.

Keywords: whiteness, asylum policy, queer African migrants, Austria, decolonial epistemology, oral history, critical discourse analysis, epistemic violence, border regime

Short biography 

Henrie Dennis is a Nigerian born human rights activist, curator, researcher and cultural mediator working at the intersections of art, critical scholarship and grassroots engagement. Her work engages queerness, migration, border politics, resource redistribution, gender, anti racism and decolonization, examining the structures that shape belonging, exclusion and social justice.
She graduated with honors in June 2023 from Univ. Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić’s Studio for Post Conceptual Art (IBK) and is currently researching migration, queerness, race and border politics, focusing on how state institutions produce exclusion and shape access to mobility, recognition and rights.
She is the founder of Afro Rainbow Austria, co chair of Planet10, the elected European representative on the ILGA World Women’s Committee, and curator of the African collections at the Weltmuseum Wien.
Through research, curatorial practice and advocacy, she challenges dominant knowledge frameworks.