Do mobile phone bans show that immigration detention is becoming more like prison?

Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance

“…In detention, non-citizens are subject to particularly intense forms of surveillance and exposure that, paradoxically, render them ‘invisible as persons of value and agency’ (Loughnan, 2022). Thus, rather than totalising spaces of disappearance, authoritative attempts to control of the visibility and audibility of detention, and of other flows of information about asylum seekers’ experiences (Boon-Kuo, 2022), can variously function to hide, normalise, or legitimise the structural and epistemic violence of indefinite detention (Loughnan, 2020; Mountz, 2015; O’Donnell, 2022). Indeed, the legitimacy of border securitisation is in part achieved through visual(ised) performances of state control that transmute the trauma of border confinement into a ‘telegenic’ or media ‘spectacle’ (Pugliese, 2008; Walsh, 2015).…”

“…In a speech delivered in Melbourne on 23 September 2020, Dao, Green and Tjhia noted that, for the participating artists in detention, ‘the fact that this project exists primarily in phones is significant – the phone is their primary artistic tool’. Access to mobile phones in detention has been highly regulated and contested by government actors (Boon-Kuo, 2022), which further highlights the contingency of precarity of this work’s conditions of possibility.…”