Geographies of Containment: Logics of Enclosure in Aboriginal and Asylum Seeker Policies in Australia\u27s Northern Territory

In this dissertation, I explore how logics of enclosure underscore policies about national identity, citizenship, and belonging in Australia. Darwin, the capital of Australia\u27s Northern Territory, has become a central place for policy struggles over migration and Aboriginal communities over the past ten years. The city offers a lens through which to read geopolitical processes of migration and detention, sovereignty and citizenship, and settler colonialism and consider their consequences for people\u27s everyday lives. Asylum seekers in Australia face policies of mandatory detention while they wait and hope for refugee status, and Darwin\u27s many immigration detention centers have earned it the name `Detention Capital of Australia.\u27 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory have also experienced restrictive policies since the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation targeted their communities, and Darwin has become the capital of this `Intervention\u27 into Aboriginal communities as well. I argue that these sets of policies reveal a common logic towards policymaking in Australia that relies on containment to engage with populations perceived as threatening to perceptions of Australian nationality. A logic of containment--an approach towards policymaking relying on strategies of enclosure--underscores policies towards asylum seekers and Aboriginal populations. I conclude that similar logics of enclosure, or containment, trap Aboriginal Australians, asylum seekers, and advocates seeking justice, confining their minds and bodies, limiting possibilities for their futures, and revealing the precariousness of their human security in the search for a secure national identity

Navigating the coherence of sea ice

Ice breaking by ships can cause irreparable harm to the ecologies and cultures of northern regions. This chapter revolves around a central question: what are the barriers preventing the development of a legal mechanism to limit this act of environmental violence? The chapter suggests that the central barrier is not so much legal as it is ontological: foundational conceptions of space that underpin Western legal institutions are unable to value the form of water, reducing it instead to an ed space that is used for movement or resource extraction. This chapter demonstrates how a consideration of the environmental violence of ice breaking requires us to challenge underlying ideas about the various surfaces, volumes, structures, and movements of ocean-space that are inherent in Western conceptions of mobility, time, and territory. By looking beyond the ocean’s seemingly formless liquidity, this chapter explores how thinking from an oceanic perspective can challenge the limits of law, and how an inquiry that directly interrogates legal norms and institutions can reveal gaps in our understanding and governance of the ocean

Navigating the Structural Coherence of Sea Life

Ice breaking by ships can cause irreparable harm to the ecologies and cultures of northern regions. This chapter revolves around a central question: what are the barriers preventing the development of a legal mechanism to limit this act of environmental violence? The chapter suggests that the central barrier is not so much legal as it is ontological: foundational conceptions of space that underpin Western legal institutions are unable to value the form of water, reducing it instead to an ed space that is used for movement or resource extraction. This chapter demonstrates how a consideration of the environmental violence of ice breaking requires us to challenge underlying ideas about the various surfaces, volumes, structures, and movements of ocean-space that are inherent in Western conceptions of mobility, time, and territory. By looking beyond the ocean’s seemingly formless liquidity, this chapter explores how thinking from an oceanic perspective can challenge the limits of law, and how an inquiry that directly interrogates legal norms and institutions can reveal gaps in our understanding and governance of the ocean

Transnational Affective Circuitry: Public Information Campaigns, Affective Governmentality, and Border Enforcement

Geographers have been central to identifying and exploring the shifting spatialities of border enforcementand how different enforcement strategies alter the geography of state sovereignty. Migration-related publicinformation campaigns (PICs) are one strategy that has received increasing attention from geographers andsocial scientists more broadly in recent years. Although existing research examines the sites and spaceswhere PICs are distributed, as well as the affective content of their messaging, little research has examinedthe development of campaigns and the transnational connections that enable their deployment. This articledraws on work in the fields of carceral circuitry and transnational enforcement networks to expand ourunderstanding of affective governmentality as a transnational strategy of border governance. Based on datacollected as part of a large-scale comparative study of the use of PICs by the U.S. and Australiangovernments, we argue that this form of affective governmentality relies on transnational circuits throughwhich people, money, and knowledge move to enable the development and circulation of affectivemessaging. In doing so, we develop the concept of transnational affective circuitry to refer to the oftencontingent, temporary relations and connections that enable PICs to operate as a form of transnationalaffective governmentality aimed at hindering unauthorized migration. Our analysis illustrates thetransnational connections that enable increasingly expansive and creative forms of border enforcement toemerge while also expanding the scope of examinations of affective governmentality to attend to therelations that undergird and enable this form of transnational governance.US National Science Foundation12 month embargo; first published 25 July 2023This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Relational enforcement: The family and the expanding scope of border enforcement

Scholars have increasingly focused on the role of the family within border enforcement practices. In this paper, we build on and extend these research efforts to propose a research agenda driven by a new understanding of the relationship between families and immigration enforcement. Drawing on examinations of emerging enforcement strategies, including family separation and public information campaigns, we suggest that the family as a social unit and set of relationships is increasingly targeted within the regulation of transnational migration, what we term “relational enforcement.” Greater attention to relational enforcement tactics, processes, and impacts helps to frame geographies of border enforcement.National Science FoundationImmediate accessThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, And Migration Control

In this article, we argue that destitution economies of migration control are specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices that produce migrant and refugee destitution. Comparative analysis of three case studies, including border encampment in Thailand, deprivation in U.S. immigration detention centers, and deterrence through destitution in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that circuits of value depend on the detachment of workers from citizenship and simultaneously produce both migrant destitution and new forms of value production. Within destitution economies, migration and asylum’s particular juridico-political position as domestic, foreign, and securitized allows legal regimes to produce migrants and asylum seekers as distinct economic subjects: forsaken recipients of aid. Although they might also work for pay, we argue that destitute migrants and asylum seekers have value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty. That is, in their categorization as migrants and asylum seekers, they occupy a particular position in relation to economic circuits. These economic circuits of migration control, in turn, rely on the destitution of mobile people. Our approach advances political geographies of migration, bordering, and exclusion as well as economic geographies of marketization and value, arguing that the predominance of political analysis and critique of immigration and asylum regimes obscures how those regimes produce circuits of value in and through law, state practices, and exclusion. Furthermore, law, state power, and forced mobility constitute circuits of value and marketization. Conceptualizing these migration control practices as destitution economies illuminates novel transformations of the political and economic geographies of migration, borders, and inequality