Living the Spectre of Forced Return: Negotiations of Identity, Belonging, and Home in British Immigration Detention
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Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
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Living the Spectre of Forced Return: Negotiations of Identity, Belonging, and Home in British Immigration Detention
BISR Home and Exile Working Group
Speaker: Dr Sarah Turnbull, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London
Immigration detention and deportation are being increasingly utilised in many countries as key state responses to unwanted migration. These practices work together to force migrants to 'home' or third countries, giving them little to no 'choice' about whether to stay or leave. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across four British immigration removal centres (IRCs), this paper explores detainees' lived experiences of deportability and their perceptions of the possibility of 'going home,' often against their wishes and occasionally by the use of force. It examines how detainees understand and make sense of their pending 'returns' (via administrative removal or deportation) in relation to the themes of identity, belonging, and home. The paper also considers the various ways in which detainees resist this particular exercise of state power in the context of extreme uncertainty, vulnerability, and unpredictability characteristic of life in British IRCs. It shows how those subject to detention and removal negotiate these interconnected practices, acting as best they can within coercive and isolating carceral institutions.
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The Home and Exile Working Group examines migration and tries to think about it in a different way, as a loss of homeland but also the making of a new home and asks, what makes it possible for people to feel at home in exile.
BISR is the focal point for social research at Birkbeck and a hub for its dissemination and discussion in London and beyond.
Contact name:
Madisson Brown