THE POLITICS OF DETENTION
The second seminar of the Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Detention series (http://immigration-detention-seminar-series.org/)
National Centre for Early Music, York
1 July 2013
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?
Speakers include:
Caroline Fleay (Curtin University, Australia)
Melanie Friend (University of Sussex)
Chowra Makaremi (L'ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Jerome Phelps (Detention Action, London)
Anna Pratt (York University, Canada)
Vicki Squire (University of Warwick)
The seminar is free to attend, but places are limited. Please contact [log in to unmask] if you would like to come along.
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