Paper short abstract:

This paper explores histories of resistance in and against the European detention regime as moments and practices of 'undoing' bordering, carcerality, and coloniality. In doing so, this multi-sited study unfolds a variety of imaginaries and relationalities resisting the border-carceral continuum.

Paper long abstract:

The proliferation of immigration detention centres across the European territory evinces a crucial connection between borders, carcerality, and the continuation of the colonial project. Decades of critical research by scholars, activists, journalists, and former detainees has attempted to bring this to the light. In this context, my work explores contemporary histories of resistance in and against the European detention regime. These compose fragmented, cross-border, and decentralised ‘counter-archives’ anchored to grassroots circuits of knowledge production. My project engages with counter-archives of resistance by dwelling on a variety of sites across the UK and Spain where bordering, carcerality, and coloniality are simultaneously ‘done’ and ‘undone’.

In the framework of my PhD project, this paper examines moments of ‘undoing’ the detention regime by thinking through visuality and spatiality. To foreground this I outline my archival and ethnographic methodology deeply inspired from militant research and decolonial scholarship. Following this, I unfold a multiplicity of histories of resistance which takes me from grassroots documentaries across the Spanish state to radical social centres in South London, stopping by public squares in Barcelona’s old city centre and anti-raids meetings in the UK. Through these I analyse attempts to ‘undo’ bordering politically as well as epistemologically, paying attention to the tensions and contradictions present in multiple sites while teasing out processes of meaning-making referring to the visual and the spatial. Via a decolonial and abolitionist lens, this opens up possibilities for engaging with relationalities and imaginaries which push beyond the coloniality of borders and the carceral continuum.