The deprivation of certitude, legitimacy and hope: foreign national prisoners and the pains of imprisonment

At the end of March 2015 there were 10,481 foreign nationals (defined as non-UK passport holders) held in prisons in England and Wales, representing 12 per cent of the overall prison population. The latest published figures from December 2014 also indicated that there were a further 394 immigration detainees also being held in various prisons, rather than Immigration Removal Centres, across England and Wales. Although Sykes’s deprivation model with its associated ‘pains of imprisonment’ has been exhaustively explored by penologists, this article argues that there are a new range of ‘pains’ uniquely faced by foreign national prisoners in England and Wales who come under the scrutiny of the Home Office’s Immigration Service. Drawing on quasi-ethnographic fieldwork in a Specialist Foreign National Prison, this article discusses the new pains relating to a lack of certitude, legitimacy and hope with regard to both their carceral and post-carceral lives

Ways of Working in the Interpretive Tradition

The kinds of specialised questions that tend to be generated in educational contexts are intimately connected to professional practices, with the aim of understanding the complexities of social, discursive and textual practices within those contexts. This chapter presents an analysis of a range of difficult-to-categorise qualitative work that spans grounded theory, through post-structural analysis to structural linguistics, and which the authors in this section have used to address such complex and contextualised questions. What draws the work together is the notion of interpretation. The social, linguistic and psychological phenomena which form the heart of these questions raises challenges for researchers as they develop interpretive analyses that honours agency, multiplicity and difference. This chapter showcases and analyses the approaches of nine researchers as they undertake this kind of interpretive work. In the process, it also highlights the evolution of research methods, as new ‘emerging’ and continuously expanding forms of educational research driven by an ever-increasing range of educational problems, contexts, and interpretive tools to understand them