Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the experiences of ‘detainable’ people in the UK asylum and Immigration system, with a focus on those ‘locked out’ of their asylum accommodation during a year of fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, and their attempts to navigate forms of disappearance and visibility.

Paper long abstract:

People within the UK asylum and immigration system must navigate a multitude of carceral techniques and spaces, often imbued with the threat of disappearance and questions of visibility. Based on 12 months’ fieldwork in Glasgow, Scotland, working with people going through both immigration detention and the asylum housing and support system, this paper will examine how people within this system try to work through questions of their ‘detainability’ and the possibility of being ‘disappeared’ through detention and deportation, in the everyday. It focuses on an attempt to evict 300 people from asylum accommodation in Glasgow, through so-called ‘lock-change evictions’ - replacing the locks on someone’s house while they are out – and the campaigns against this. Here, the physical boundaries of a house may become imbued with the ‘carcerality’ of changed locks, house searches, and moved belongings - but ‘staying put’ and engaging in strategic visibility, often through NGO and activist groups, can be a way to regain some control. Neighbourhood organising against disappearances and the spectral threat of a ‘lock-change’ must respond to the possibility of being ‘locked out’ of home, as well as ‘locked in’ an Immigration Removal Centre, with both becoming sites of disappearance. Concurrently, methodological questions of ethics, participation and observation require new consideration to avoid replicating carceral forms of surveillance and ‘capture’, to consider anthropology’s difficult role in making disappearance visible: to explore potential new futures beyond the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and their locks.