Destitution economies: relationships of enforced precarity and migration control
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
This project examines sites, spaces and practices where forms of destitution intersect with immigration enforcement and migration management. This project is a collaboration with Deirdre Conlon (Leeds University) and Lauren Martin (Durham University). We locate ‘destitution economies’ in the conceptual intersection of political economy and feminist political geography’s continued focus on the everyday workings of states and other institutions of power, and understand these economies to encompass production, exchange, related social, cultural, intersectional, and intimate relationships. We seek to explore how processes of commodification, dispossession, and control leads to relentless forms of structural, slow violence that migrants experience in their everyday lives. We are currently writing a paper tracing the circuits through which migration management relies on and helps to produce destitution economies in a variety of sites.
The slow violence of cashless technologies
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
This is a collaboration with Lauren Martin (Durham University) examining the role of cashless technologies in migration enforcement. My own work is centered on comparisons between the UK, where refused asylum seekers who are considered ‘destitute’ are provided with subsistence-level financial support through the Azure card, a ‘cashless’ technology similar to a debit card that can be used for purchasing food, toiletries, clothing and phone credits at participating retailers, and Australia, where identical ‘cashless’ technology is used to ‘quarantine’ the welfare benefits of mainly Aboriginal residents of the Northern Territory (NT). In each case, the technology restricting access to cash limits participation in the wider community. I am exploring the underlying state logics driving such punitive fiscal policies directed at these marginalized populations, and argue that cashless technologies represent a form of slow violence that employs fiscal tactics to undermine the provision of care for these marginalized populations. I ask: what do these technologies reveal about the priorities of the nation-state? For whom does the state care? I maintain that under the guise of ‘caring’ and ‘for their own good,’ these fiscal tactics in reality act as measures of intense control, ushering in new forms of surveillance, limits to mobility and opportunities for harassment and discrimination.
Landscapes of protection in the Asia-Pacific
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
Migrant enforcement in the Indian Ocean region reflects broad issues about sovereignty, territory, and the mobility of borders. In work in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand funded by the British Council (2015), I explored how protection for asylum seekers takes shape as ad hoc, arbitrary, and differentially applied across space, leading to extreme precariousness. I compared conditions in Thailand to the UK, where similar deterioration of treatment of asylum seekers is symptomatic of the disintegration of the existing refugee protection system established by the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter ‘Convention’). This comparison is framed using two key concepts: the landscapes of protection that encompass the range of practices engaged in refugee governance, from signed treaties to soft laws, subcontracted service providers, and substandard media coverage; and the graduated levels of protection that rely on spatial logics to manage access to protection and shapes both refugees’ imagined futures as well as their present status. This comparison challenges the implicit distinctions between signatories and non-signatories to the Convention that have predominated in refugee scholarship, and extends recent scholarship that deconstructs the coherence and authority of the nation-state. I conclude that these presumed divisions are not only inaccurate, but mask the precarious and dangerous realities that asylum seekers and refugees face in both locations. Increasingly, the protections offered by the Convention have become a façade for arbitrary and harmful treatment of refugees.
Additional work focuses on the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, exploring the data-driven technologies that surveil refugees’ offshore movements, allow for their apprehension or pushback before they reach their destinations, or track their biometric footprints through humanitarian assistance processes, have highlighted the instability of where borders are and even what borders represent. Future research funding will allow for comparative ethnographic field research examining the role of such data-driven and biometric technologies in the surveillance of refugee mobility in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand. This project highlights the increased instability of regional boundary-making and migrant enforcement practices and the role of digital technologies in restricting access to asylum and protection throughout the region.
Additional work focuses on the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, exploring the data-driven technologies that surveil refugees’ offshore movements, allow for their apprehension or pushback before they reach their destinations, or track their biometric footprints through humanitarian assistance processes, have highlighted the instability of where borders are and even what borders represent. Future research funding will allow for comparative ethnographic field research examining the role of such data-driven and biometric technologies in the surveillance of refugee mobility in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand. This project highlights the increased instability of regional boundary-making and migrant enforcement practices and the role of digital technologies in restricting access to asylum and protection throughout the region.
Migration, borders, and settler colonialism in Australia
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
This ongoing work seeks to explore the connections between ongoing settler colonial practices in Australia as well as the range of migration controls targeting asylum seekers that have been developed by the Australian government since the 1990s. I have explored the similar, mobile carceral logics underscoring these different policy regimes, which become manifested through practices such as imprisonment, spatial segregation, and forms of psychological and financial confinement that continue outside of carceral spaces and institution. I've investigated the intimate economies of immigration detention in Darwin, Australia that rely on traditions of ambiguity and erasure across the community. I've considered the relationship between ethnographic methods and settler colonialism in demands for voice. Most recently, I've argued that strategies of deterrence, detention, and the production of illegality aimed at asylum seekers who arrive to Australia by boat characterize Australian immigration policies. While the reach of Australia’s border enforcement appears extensive and the practices encompassed within it actively shrink refugees’ access to asylum, in practice, policies are fractured and make visible potential—but not always substantial—opportunities for change, even as they are also becoming models for regional border enforcement.
Feminist geographies
Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, England
My continued exploration of feminist geographies encompasses research methods, pedagogy, and new frameworks for analysis bringing together studies of trauma and emotional geographic work into conversation. Recently, students from my third year course 'Feminist Geographies of Intimacy' and co-instructor Rachel Colls (Durham University) and I co-authored a rapid response piece for Gender, Place and Culture reflecting on the reactions to the 2017 Women's March on Washington across the UK and our use of the March as a generative space for discussion, student involvement, and activism.
Ice Law Project
Postdoctoral research associate, IBRU Centre for Borders Research, Durham, England
Ice complicates a world view where solid, stable land is positioned opposite liquid, mobile water. Ice melts and freezes; it breaks apart and moves; it has both land-like and water-like social properties; its edges are unclear. Ice is as challenging for international lawyers, boundary practitioners, and political theorists as it is for geoscientists and global environmental policymakers.
I will be working with the Ice Law Project to investigate the potential for a legal framework that acknowledges the complex geophysical environment in the world’s frozen regions and and explore the impact that an ice-sensitive legal system would have on topics ranging from the everyday activities of Arctic residents to the territorial foundations of the modern state.
I will be working with the Ice Law Project to investigate the potential for a legal framework that acknowledges the complex geophysical environment in the world’s frozen regions and and explore the impact that an ice-sensitive legal system would have on topics ranging from the everyday activities of Arctic residents to the territorial foundations of the modern state.
Asylum seekers, Aboriginal Australians, and containment as policy approach
Doctoral Dissertation, Darwin, Australia
My doctoral research constructs an ethnography of an Australian approach to policies towards Aboriginal Australians and asylum seekers between 2001 and 2012. Despite their different histories and contexts, situating these policies alongside one another allows me to explore what I term the 'geographies of containment' which underscore the political logics common to both cases. Qualitative research in Darwin, Australia in 2011-2012 focused on the effects of Australian asylum seeker policies of the 2000's on what is now the 'detention capital of Australia' as well as the simultaneous restructuring of Australian political approaches towards Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and their governance after the introduction of the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention policies. My dissertation frames geographies of containment in terms of their material sites, discursive constructions, and psychological forms of restraint and limitation that move across and through areas of spatial or territorial enclosure.
Asylum seekers and ambiguous island geographies
Research Assistant, Island Detention Project, Australia and Indonesia
This project, headed by Dr. Alison Mountz at Wilfrid Laurier University, examines migrants' journeys between states, focusing on islands as particular sites where struggles over migration, asylum, and sovereignty transpire and where federal mandates of national security and refugee protection intersect. Islands are often sites where jurisdiction, political status, and legal status intersect in complex ways. My part of this research project took me to Christmas Island, Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney, Australia, as well as to Jakarta, Indonesia. I used qualitative research methods to explore the effects of detention sites and practices on islands, asking: why do certain islands become sites of migration management? How do migrants arrive on islands? What kinds of legal issues ensue? See www.islanddetentionproject.org for more information.
Local politics, state practices, and settler colonialism
M.A. research, Seward, Alaska
My master's thesis explores the mobility and variability of state practices in small-town Alaska. It is the result of qualitative research that included 42 open-ended interviews in Seward, Alaska and archival work at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. I use the concept of embodiment, a strategic feminist methodological and theoretical positioning that foregrounds the scale of the body, as a way to understand the settler colonial past and present that shapes Alaskan ways of living. Throughout the thesis, I build on Kathleen Steward’s (1996: 29) notion that “stories are productive.” I explore the materiality of the language that people in Seward use to describe their town, their lives, and how they imagine their government, creating a collage of stories that double back over Seward’s recent history, constructing and reconstructing places, states, and people.
