Paper short abstract:

not used

Paper long abstract:

The detention of 'illegal' immigrants and 'failed' asylum seekers has become routine within the UK immigration and asylum system. Thousands of people are detained each year in dedicated Immigration Removal Centres (IRC) across the UK, run by private contractors or the prison service. Enclosed, isolated and invisible; these contentious centres form part of a growing international archipelago of spaces of confinement. The rationalised, disciplinary context of the IRC is a central part of the experiences of those people who find themselves in the UK with uncertain immigration status. Yet little is known about how the detention centre works, and few studies 'go inside'. Notwithstanding the insights gained by viewing detention centres in light of the exception (Agamben 1995), analyses that 'stop at the centre gates' reveal little of the fraught, seething environment in which detainees and staff work and live. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among staff at an UK detention centre (whose decisions within a distinct working culture modulate the experiences of detainees), this paper considers how fine-grained anthropological analysis of the working practices of the secure establishment might shed light on the meaning of being detained. If the controversial immigration centre is an abject space (Isin and Rygiel 2007), then it is vital to pay attention to the mundane and contradictory social practices through which the detainee comes to be recognised (or not) within this key site, and the way this recognition is intertwined with fear, indifference and empathy.