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Summary
Jacobsen, M.H., Crane, A. & Dosch, E. (2025) Toward a feminist geo-legal reading: US country-of-origin information in asylum adjudication. Area, Early View, 30 Oct. 2025
Abstract
In this article, we offer what we call ‘a feminist geo-legal reading’ of documents used in spaces and practices of law. Legal cases and decisions are often based on different legal and non-legal documents, including laws, explanatory memorandums, testimonies, medical reports, and so forth. In contemporary asylum adjudication, country-of-origin information reports (COIs) have become a crucial source of authoritative evidence as asylum officers and immigration judges use these reports in their determination of a person’s need for and right to protection. However, there is no straight line from COIs’ substance to the prevailing authority that they command within asylum adjudication. Thus, we bring together insights from feminist legal geographies and critical refugee studies to develop a critical method of reading and analysis of documents, like COIs. Specifically, we provide a feminist geo-legal reading of a 2022 COI on El Salvador produced by the US Department of State. Our reading interrogates COIs’ substance, what they are made of and what they obfuscate. We argue this method of reading can enable legal geographers to question the claimed neutrality, objectivity and impartiality of documents used in law and juridical decisions through highlighting the legal and political geographies that these documents are part of and (re)produce. In this way, a feminist geo-legal reading functions as a mode of critique and enables scholars to make space for other knowledges. Thus, this article contributes to the growing body of work on methods and methodologies used by socio-legal scholars and legal geographers.
