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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the circulation of emotions within and between Dutch Immigration workers, NGO workers, and asylum lawyers in the asylum system in the Netherlands. Combining empirical and legal methods, it looks at the everyday, social realities that shape how asylum law is practiced.

Paper long abstract:

With this research, I explore through ethnographic fieldwork and case file analysis how Dutch Immigration workers, NGO workers, and asylum lawyers navigate and make sense of emotions in their everyday practices of interviewing or preparing asylum seekers. These everyday practices are emotionally charged, and its emotional encounters, interactions, decisions, and ideologies, shape asylum law in practice. A large body of scholarship has demonstrated that law and emotion are inextricably linked, despite the dominant positivist legal paradigm that considers law to be rational as opposed to emotional, and holds that law ought to be applied in a way that is objective and distanced (Grossi 2015). Emotion is economic: it does not reside in a given subject, but “the movement between signs or objects converts into affect” (Ahmed 2014, 45), and through its circulation it creates affective value. How emotions are named and communicated can thus serve as an entry point of an analysis of its role in social formations. Emotions are constructed through relations of power and domination and constitute “the underside of ideology” (Hochschild 1979, 557), the forms of practical thinking and “mental frameworks… different social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (Hall 1983, 136). My research brings together empirical and legal methods to analyze how the politics of emotion affect asylum law and decision-making practices. In this panel, I will present some of my preliminary findings based on fieldwork with the IND and interviews with asylum lawyers.