The Politics of Detention

09.00 – 09.30: Arrival and Registration 

09.30 – 09.45: Introduction (Alex Hall, University of York) 

09.45 – 10.45: Session I

Frances Webber (Institute of Race Relations)

Creating bogeymen: foreign offenders and the imperative of detention 

Caroline Fleay (Curtin University, Australia)

Business as usual: the normalisation of immigration detention in Australia 

10.45 – 11.00: Group discussion 

11.00 – 11.30: Coffee 

11.30 – 13.00: Session II

Chowra Makaremi (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Immigration detention and the reframing of borders: the case of France 

Vicki Squire (University of Warwick)

Detention and the politics of mobility: the US context 

Jerome Phelps (Detention Action, London)

What could be a politics of detention? 

13.00 – 13.15: Group discussion 

13.15-14.15: Lunch 

14.15 – 15.00 Session III

Anna Pratt (York University, Canada)

Making sense of immigration detention in Canada 

15.00- 15.15: Group discussion 

15.15 – 16.15: Session IV

Melanie Friend (University of Sussex)

Border Country 

Don Flynn (Migrants’ Rights Network, London)

Detention and the politics of immigration 

16.15 – 16.30 Closing comments

Seminar abstract

Detention has become a key technique through which liberal states secure their borders, manage risk and control mobility. The use of detention to govern ‘illegal’ immigrants, asylum seekers, and people deemed risky is proliferating internationally. Detention is often framed as a response to illicit or threatening forms of mobility, but it is more accurately viewed as a means through which categories of citizenship, exclusion and security are shaped and performed. Detention is increasingly preventative and pre-emptive: it interrupts the movement of people seeking humanitarian protection, it exports the sovereign border away from territorial boundaries and it constrains the mobility of suspects in the name of national security. Contemporary detention produces flexible spaces of control where multiple aims of protection, policing and punishment coalesce, and where public authorities, private organisations and civil society groups cooperate and clash in the delivery of detention. Scholars and activists working on detention have increasingly emphasised the political challenges that the detention of immigrants poses to liberal states, and the ambiguous relationship between mobility, freedom and security that contemporary detention practices embody.

This seminar aims to examine the ways in which the routinisation and normalisation of detention occludes multiple relationships of power, control and subjugation. Questions will include, but not be limited to: What kinds of subjects are produced by detention? How, precisely, do detention practices differentially value people and lives?  What kinds of authority, knowledge and expertise shape detention? Through what devices does detention constrain dissent and protestation? How are these devices experienced? What challenges face those who wish to open spaces for the political contestation of detention? To what extent does contemporary detention blur the lines between protection, prevention and punishment? 

The workshop is free to attend but capacity for the event is limited, so places will need to be booked (before Friday 14 June please). The organisers are reserving a proportion of the places for practitioners, asylum seekers and former detainees. In the case of the latter two, there are some funds to help with attendance. Please contact Alex Hall at alexandra.hall@york.ac.uk to reserve a place or to find out more.

The seminar is part of a series that will also involve events in Birmingham (‘The Relation Between Prison and Detention’, lead organiser Dominique Moran), Oxford (‘The Everyday Experience of Immigration Detention’ lead organiser Mary Bosworth) and Lancaster (‘Activism in and Around Detention’ lead organiser Imogen Tyler).

The series is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.