Deirdre Conlon

Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility

Waiting is a banal and ubiquitous practice that is linked in myriad ways to mobility and (im)mobility in the contemporary era. Yet, to date, experiences of waiting have received scant conceptual and/or research attention among scholars. Introducing a themed section of Gender, Place and Culture, this article highlights how a focus on temporal and spatial encounters with waiting and (im)mobility among migrants extends established areas of interest among feminist geographers and related interdisciplinary scholars while also augmenting scholarship in mobility studies. Key themes are introduced. These include attention to the ways waiting is imbricated with regional and international geopolitics and analyses of waiting as an active practice that involves reflection, incorporation into, as well as resistance within, the everyday spaces that migrants encounter. With an emphasis on how contributions to this themed section speak from or to a range of feminist concerns, this introduction suggests that the intersection of feminist perspectives and mobility studies engages valuable new research questions and offers possibilities for crucial insights into migrant encounters with the spacings/timings of (im)mobility.

Ties That Bind: Governmentality, the State, and Asylum in Contemporary Ireland

Coinciding with the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom of the 1990s, Ireland experienced a momentous shift in long-standing patterns of migration, with significant in-migration and an unprecedented change in population dynamics. Asylum seekers form a small and noteworthy group within the population in association with several recent legislative changes. In 2003 a previously granted guarantee of residency rights for so-called ‘non-national’ migrant parents whose children were born in Ireland was withdrawn; subsequently, in 2004 voters endorsed a referendum doing away with the Irish Constitutions provision for birthright citizenship. With this, many asylum seekers and their children who were born in Ireland were excluded from the possibility of establishing intimate ties within society and to the state. This social context forms the backdrop for examining the intersections between governmentality and the intimate ties between populations and nation-state. Drawing on recent attention to Foucaults lectures on Security, Territory, Population, three specifics themes are elaborated; these are: (i) government as a continuum of overlapping apparatuses; (ii) intersections between sovereign territory and population; and (iii) the question of the state in Foucaults work. These themes are elucidated with reference to housing policies, living conditions, and newsprint discourses that prevailed upon women asylum seekers in particular prior to Irelands 2004 citizenship referendum. The associated unraveling and rearrangement of governmental practices and rejigging of the Irish State highlights some of the ways intimacy and population are tangled together as populations are produced.

The Tactics of Asylum and Irregular Migrant Support Groups: Disrupting Bodily, Technological, and Neoliberal Strategies of Control

States are exercising an increasing array of spatial strategies of migration control, including in the area of asylum migration. Drawing on interview data with thirty-five British and American irregular migrant and asylum support groups (MASGs), this article explores the spatial “tactics” (De Certeau 1984) employed by MASGs in response to strategies of migration control. We consider their infiltration of highly securitized physical spaces like detention centers and courts. We analyze their appropriation of control technologies and discuss their exploitation of inconsistencies within the neoliberalization of controls. These tactics highlight the importance of resistive actions that are carried out “within enemy territory” (De Certeau 1984, 37). As such, they represent a complementary set of actions to more radical forms of protest and consequently enrich our understanding of the diversity of forms of resistance.

The business of child detention: charitable co-option, migrant advocacy and activist outrage

In 2010 the British government announced that the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end. Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention centre called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children’s charity Barnardo’s. This article draws on focus group research with migrant advocacy groups, to examine the ways in which Barnardo’s’ role within CEDARS is variously imagined as mitigating and/or legitimating the use of detention as a border control mechanism. In particular we ask: what are the consequences of the co-option of charities and voluntary organisations within the immigration detention market? Has the neoliberal trend towards the ‘professionalisation of dissent’ diminished political opposition to immigration detention in Britain and the wider world? 1 Has humanitarian activism on behalf of migrants (unintentionally) contributed to the exponential growth of for-profit migrant detention markets?

‘Germs’ in the heart of the other: emigrant scripts, the Celtic Tiger and lived realities of return

Abstract During the 1990s and 2000s, the period coinciding with Irelands economic and social transformation and ubiquitously referred to as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, the Irish nation transitioned from being an emigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving society. In association with this shift, considerable attention has been devoted to Irelands new immigrant groups, including refugees and asylum seekers and more recently to migrant workers from new EU accession states. During the same period, inward migration was consistently comprised of significant numbers of former emigrants returning to Ireland; however, the place and experiences of Irelands return migrants has received comparatively little attention from mainstream media sources and is a relatively recent development in scholarship on migration. Taking as its impetus Piaras MacEinris (2001) call for scholarship that places Irelands history of emigration alongside contemporary immigration, this paper critically explores scripts – media representat...

Carceral circuitry: New directions in carceral geography

Despite the popular impression of prisons and other carceral spaces as disconnected from broader social systems, they are traversed by various circulations that reach within and beyond their boundaries. This article opens a new analytical window onto this reality, developing the concept of ‘circuits’ to critically enquire into the carceral. Drawing inspiration from Harvey (1982; 1985), the article makes circuits do fresh work, teasing apart the emerging carceral landscape to provide a new critical epistemology for carceral geographies. In so doing, a meta-institutional agenda for critical carceral geography is derived, and possible ways to short-circuit carceral systems are revealed.

Beyond privatization: bureaucratization and the spatialities of immigration detention expansion

ABSTRACT Beyond privatization: bureaucratization and the spatialities of immigration detention expansion. Territory, Politics, Governance. Immigration detention has become central to models of immigration enforcement in the United States and globally. This paper elaborates a conceptual framework to facilitate critical understanding of detention’s proliferation that goes beyond the role of privatization as well as beyond public–private sector relationships. It draws on a study of immigration detention in Essex County, New Jersey, with a focus on the contractual arrangements delineating detention between public and private entities and actors. Our conceptual framework posits processes of bureaucratization as central to the growth in immigration detention. We understand bureaucratization as a spatialized process of obfuscation that both builds multidimensional webs of interdependence between public and private actors and flattens these relationships into one-dimensional rational economic decisions and exchanges. Through this framework, we see contractual agreements that are remarkable for fostering overlapping, snowballing relationships in the operation of facilities, while they simultaneously conceal powerful influences behind detention’s expansion, mask human rights abuses of detained migrants, and filter out moral concerns from decision-making regarding detention.

Geographical perspectives on detention: spatial control and its contestation: Academics, Activists and Policy-makers

This chapter explores research about detention conducted by geographers and other scholars using geographical methods. Geographers conceptualize detention as a form of spatial control, and we suggest that this approach offers tools to scholars and activists aiming to contest detention. The discussion of existing scholarship is organized around three themes: im/mobilities, scaled analyses, and borders/bordering. We offer empirical examples of geographic work on the spatial control of non-citizens, as well as contestation of these mechanisms. We contend that geographic perspectives on detention embody and exemplify a critical orientation with the power to disrupt the spread of detention across and within a widening array of places and social groups.

Going public: reflections on predicaments and possibilities in public research and scholarship

On the afternoon of 14 May 2011, only minutes before a Paris-bound flight departed from Kennedy Airport, officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey boarded the airplane and arrested Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Several hours earlier, Naffisatou Diallo — a hotel housekeeper and asylee1 from Guinea — had reported that Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted and attempted to rape her when she went to clean the Manhattan hotel room where he had been staying until earlier that day. Almost instantaneously, news media outlets began salivating over the sordid details of the alleged scandal involving such a high-profile figure as ‘DSK’, as he is known (Goldfarb, 2011), the media initially, sympathising with Diallo (Dickey and Solomon, 2011). Before long, however, attention turned to scepticism as private details and uncertainties about Diallo’s character and her past were catapulted into full view as fodder for public consumption. Headlines splashed accounts of seemingly shady connections, questionable financial transactions, and alleged mistruths and misdeeds by the woman who brought charges against DSK (Italiano, 2011). Many of the news stories and exposes replayed what Welch and Schuster (2005) have described as the ‘noisy’ discursive construction of asylum seekers. This account draws on Cohen’s (2002) discussion of moral panic theory.

Why wait? Practice, politics, and percipience in Timepass:

Craig Jeffrey’s Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Waiting in India is a commanding and lucid ethnography of the social and political impacts of globalized development and liberalization in the everyday lives of youth and middle-class groups more generally in contemporary Indian society. The account is centrally focused on the experiences of young men from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) for whom individual aspirations and the promises of postcolonial middle-class Indian society confront and give way to protracted encounters with waiting. Timepass, which, in India, is idiomatic for ‘ways to pass the time’ (p. 4), encapsulates multiple registers of waiting; with each successive chapter, Jeffrey deftly elucidates the nuanced, often contradictory, and perhaps unexpected politics of waiting that play out within the orbit of these young men’s lives.