Carceral ethnography in a time of pandemic: Examining migrant detention and deportation during COVID-19

Abstract

Each year the United States government detains and deports hundreds of thousands of people who prior to their removal are held in confinement for an average of 55 days. The short and long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic on migrant detention and deportation continue to be evaluated in real time, including how we can best study it. This paper provides a timely analysis on the relationship between immigration enforcement and confinement, public health emergencies, and ethnographic methods. It makes two contributions. The first is methodological and focuses on the challenges and opportunities of ethnographic methods in carceral settings when pandemic-related protocols have raised additional challenges to conventional in-person prison ethnography. The second contribution is empirical and documents how we adapted ethnographic methods to an interdisciplinary research design and to the exigencies of the pandemic to study the spread of the coronavirus in four immigrant detention facilities in New Jersey, USA.

Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation

“…Such dynamics, however, remain deeply understudied, particularly in the Global North where gaining meaningful access to the imprisoned can be difficult (see Cunha, 2014 ; Wacquant, 2002 ). COVID-19 lockdowns exacerbated this state of affairs, forcing prison researchers to rely even more heavily on government data that cannot capture the complex nature of carceral community, making prisoners’ lived realities even more invisible ( Berg et al, 2022 ). This is unfortunate, since we now know that most prison systems were “in no way equipped” to protect prisoners from the pandemic ( Burki, 2020 ), and calls to “decarcerate” or otherwise protect vulnerable prisoners went virtually unheeded in most countries (particularly in the United States (Widra, 2022)).…”

Patchwork ethnography

“…Many scholars are already spreading the seeds of the manifesto. Some argue that it is not only fieldwork but also the ethnographer who is patchwork (Chua, 2021), that dislocation (Islam, 2022) or punctuated access to a place (Thieme, 2021) might be a more apt way to understand certain forms of ethnographic research, and that patchwork ethnography bolsters existing work based on collaborative methods (e.g., Berg et al., 2022; Hong, 2021). On our website (https://www.patchworkethnography.com/conversations), we showcase ethnographers who share with us how patchwork ethnography gives a name to their alternative forms of fieldwork.…”

Toward a Du Boisian paradigm of family science

“…The Covid‐19 pandemic and uprising against White supremacy and police violence beginning in 2020 in the United States and globally has, for many scholars, fundamentally shifted the ways that research and teaching are viewed and carried out (Bartholomay, 2022; Berg et al, 2022; Santellano, 2022). Though many researchers were already taking a critical or radical approach in their scholarship, especially those studying areas such as racism, state violence, or the carceral state, this contemporary moment required us to collectively (re)examine the ways that we understand and frame our research, engage with the topics and participants of our research, and contribute to the pursuit of knowledge production.…”