Repository logo
 

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Ethnographies of immigration detention
    Publication . Ugelvik, Thomas; Bosworth, Mary; Turnbull, Sarah; Matos, Raquel
    There has traditionally been a special relationship between the state, its citizens and the territory it controls, often thought of as a form of contract binding the three together. Huge shifts have occurred in recent years, however. Increased international mobility means non-citizens are showing up, legitimately or illegitimately, in unprecedented numbers. Consequently, "the immigrant" has become a new political and administrative object for (Western) states. The states, in turn, are developing new systems for the greeting, evaluation, classification and ultimately either integration or deportation of the outsiders at the border. Criminological scholarship has in recent years brought renewed attention to the transformative impact of migration on issues of crime and justice. Generally speaking, the focus has been on the impact of migration on crime practices and crime rates. Researchers have particularly focused on immigrant gangs, various forms of migration-related crime and the deepening of urban marginality. While acknowledging the importance of these contributions, we want to argue that there is also a need to describe systematically the specific impact that migratory flows have had on the everyday life of people on "both sides" in the migration control system. Migration control is, as migration itself, an intrinsically transnational phenomenon and thus challenges traditionally national footing of state policies and state laws. It involves measures within and beyond national and European territories. These practices create novel spaces and notions of territoriality: 'in between spaces', borderlands or what Saskia Sassen has called 'third spaces'. Our objective is to examine the spaces where national systems of justice meet their limits. We want to study these institutions ethnographically, "from the ground up", partly to compare different institutions in different jurisdictions and partly to explore whether it makes sense to see these institutions as part of the same development on the European level.
  • Gender, vulnerability and everyday resistance in immigration detention: lived experiences of women detainees
    Publication . Esposito, Francesca; Matos, Raquel; Bosworth, Mary
    This paper examines immigration detention by looking at women’s experiences of confinement in a Portuguese detention facility. The empirical data—comprising participant observations, informal conversations and interviews with detained women—are read through an intersectional lens. This approach illuminates constructions of gender and sexuality in their mutual and contextualised articulation with other power relations (e.g., processes of racialisation and ethnicisation stemming from colonial histories), as well as the reconfiguration of these constructions by women themselves. Doing so also focuses on the intertwinement between power and resistance in daily life in detention. The women we met did not passively accept their situation, but rather struggled to make sense of, navigate and challenge the detention system. To this effect, they deployed multiple forms of agency, which also passed through the rejection, acceptance and reappropriation of hegemonic gendered constructions and their use in strategic ways to negotiate their positions vis-a-vis the system.