Abstract:Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) are deeply contested institutions that rarely open their doors to independent research. In this article we discuss some of the complications we faced in conducting the first national study of everyday life in them. As we will set out, research relationships were difficult to forge due to low levels of trust, and unfamiliarity with academic research. At the same time, many participants had unrealistic expectations about our capacity to assist while most exhibited high levels o… Show more
“…Like Bosworth and colleagues who speak cogently about feelings of self-doubt, guilt, anxiety, and sadness present during and after their research with adult detainees (Bosworth & Kellezi, 2017;Bosworth & Slade, 2014), we were confronted with our own distress as we bore witness to that of others. Often, we were torn between the desire to help and the obligation to stay in our researcher role.…”
Section: Emotions In the Fieldmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Entering such a space-where an often-arbitrary structure is designed to coercively control an innocent, non-criminal population-the researcher has good reason to experience strong emotions. As Bosworth and Kellezi (2017) write, "transforming human beings into bodies that can be expelled is not just a legal but also a symbolic and affective endeavour.…”
Section: The Unique Context Of Detentionmentioning
In a time of mass displacement, countries across the globe are seeking to protect borders through coercive methods of deterrence such as immigration detention. In Canada, migrants-including children-may be detained in penal facilities having neither been charged nor convicted of crimes. In this paper we examine how we dealt with the series of ethical dilemmas that emerged while doing research in immigration detention centres in Canada. Using a critical ethnographic approach, we examine the process of our research in the field, seeking to understand what our emotional responses and those of the staff could tell us about detention itself, but also about what is at stake when researchers are faced with the suffering of participants in these spaces of confinement. The findings suggest that field work in immigration detention centres is an emotionally demanding process and that there were several pivotal moments in which our sense of moral and clinical obligations toward distressed detainees, especially children, were in conflict with our role as researchers. We also grapple with how the disciplinary gaze of the detention centre affects researchers entering the space. Given these tensions, we argue, spaces of critical reflection that can consider and contain the strongly evoked emotions are crucial, both for researchers, and perhaps more challengingly, for detention centre employees and gatekeepers as well.
“…Like Bosworth and colleagues who speak cogently about feelings of self-doubt, guilt, anxiety, and sadness present during and after their research with adult detainees (Bosworth & Kellezi, 2017;Bosworth & Slade, 2014), we were confronted with our own distress as we bore witness to that of others. Often, we were torn between the desire to help and the obligation to stay in our researcher role.…”
Section: Emotions In the Fieldmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Entering such a space-where an often-arbitrary structure is designed to coercively control an innocent, non-criminal population-the researcher has good reason to experience strong emotions. As Bosworth and Kellezi (2017) write, "transforming human beings into bodies that can be expelled is not just a legal but also a symbolic and affective endeavour.…”
Section: The Unique Context Of Detentionmentioning
In a time of mass displacement, countries across the globe are seeking to protect borders through coercive methods of deterrence such as immigration detention. In Canada, migrants-including children-may be detained in penal facilities having neither been charged nor convicted of crimes. In this paper we examine how we dealt with the series of ethical dilemmas that emerged while doing research in immigration detention centres in Canada. Using a critical ethnographic approach, we examine the process of our research in the field, seeking to understand what our emotional responses and those of the staff could tell us about detention itself, but also about what is at stake when researchers are faced with the suffering of participants in these spaces of confinement. The findings suggest that field work in immigration detention centres is an emotionally demanding process and that there were several pivotal moments in which our sense of moral and clinical obligations toward distressed detainees, especially children, were in conflict with our role as researchers. We also grapple with how the disciplinary gaze of the detention centre affects researchers entering the space. Given these tensions, we argue, spaces of critical reflection that can consider and contain the strongly evoked emotions are crucial, both for researchers, and perhaps more challengingly, for detention centre employees and gatekeepers as well.
“…2015; Ellermann 2009), the nature of the agencies involved in migration control are likely to make research access difficult. Police, border guard services and prison settings are notoriously closed institutions, which often hold confidential information on individual case files and have reasons to preserve the secrecy of their institutional practices and tactics (Bosworth and Kellezi 2016). This is reflected in the response by the Finnish Border Guard Services, where research was even presented as a potential security threat:Such extensive workload would be out of operative tasks, and the implementation of the project could endanger the tactical and operational security.…”
Section: Migration Authorities’ Strategies Of Resisting Researchmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…(Email exchange with the Swedish Police, summer 2016) Most of the time, rejections of our formal research requests were vague. A defensive tone might not be surprising: political anthropologists have highlighted that access is significantly complicated in areas that concern ethically and politically sensitive issues, which certainly applies to border and migration control (Bosworth and Kellezi 2016;Fassin 2011;Satzewich 2014;Tomkinson 2014). Expectedly, the pattern seems to be that the more contested and debated the policy field, the more reluctant state authorities are to accept independent scrutiny (Bosworth and Kellezi 2016).…”
Section: I G R a T I O N A U T H O R I T I E S ' S T R A T E G I E mentioning
This article documents efforts to gain access to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in migration control agencies across eight European countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden and Switzerland. Building on repeated email exchanges, phone calls and fieldnotes from personal encounters between the researchers and state authorities, it traces and analyses state agencies’ decisions on whether or not to let researchers in to study their practices. We found that our access negotiations, including failed ones, proved analytically useful, as they drew our attention to the fragmented nature of the state agencies we attempted to study, which contrasts with the order‐making functions they claim to perform within the field of border and migration control. From our observations emerges an image of ‘the state’ as made up by many hands and ridden by internal frictions, conflicting interests and values, which contributes to rendering state practices unpredictable and opaque, also to the street‐level officials enforcing them. This opacity of state bureaucracy has profoundly disempowering effects for those trying to access it, even if it is not necessarily consciously constructed. Instead, we show how our access negotiations drew attention to the ongoing struggles over power, knowledge and order within the contested field of migration control.
“…My family would never have me back. My mother died and they don't answer my phone calls' (Bosworth & Kellezi, 2016). An African detainee resident in an IRC for several months commented on the contradiction between the aims and realities of detention centres: 'I don't want them to dump me here, this is a removal centre!…”
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