Inside Immigration Detention

Bibliographic Data

ID20003764
AuthorsMary Bosworth (0000-0002-7750-5109, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages272
Publication date2014-09-18
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueInside Immigration Detention (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199675470.001.0001
OpenAlexW2503214498
Open LibraryOL28541330M
ISBN9780199675470
LanguageEN
Citations received161

Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centres (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, this book draws together a large amount of empirical data including detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed fieldnotes. From this, the book explores how IRCs identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous, and uncertain. In this endeavour, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality. However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-day life, women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state ‘governs at distance’, via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wish to remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions inhere in concrete relationships. Such matters, which become visible through applied research, raise profound questions about the limits and pains of denial under conditions of mass mobility

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Criminology · Criticism · Denial · Distancing · Immigration · Nationality · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Law · Medicine · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Psychology · Alien detention centers · Asylums · Detention of persons · emigration and immigration · Emigration and immigration law · Government policy · Great britain · Noncitizen detention centers · Right of Asylum · Social aspects

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