Inside Asylum Bureaucracy: Organizing Refugee Status Determination in Austria

Abstract

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Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

“…In this regard the concept of empathy describes well the 'force field' constituted by the migration regime's need to gain knowledge about the asylum applicant, and the asylum seekers' yearning to be met as persons with experiential history and an open-ended future. Exposed to the destituent potential of this force field -the ruptures and surprises of embodied personhood -the migration regime thus seeks to avoid encountering persons, and where this is unavoidable, as in asylum application procedures, it makes every effort to regulate the situations in which empathy is at play (Dahlvik, 2018).…”

Shaping Administrative Practice: The Institutional Habitus

“…Secondly, I argue against the individualist assumption about discretionary freedom inherent in some of the street-level bureaucracy literature (see also Eckert 2020). This critique, again, is not entirely new; several scholars working on asylum and migration administrations have precisely pointed to the importance of studying how discretionary practices are shaped (see Brodkin 2012: 942;Dahlvik 2018;Hawkins 1992;Liodden 2016). Nevertheless, because much of the focus has been on the divergences of asylum decision-making practices rather than on how regularities in administrative practice are produced, I contend that the structuring of discretion has so far received too little attention.…”

“…With this book, I attempt to overcome this "individualist bent" (Eckert 2020: 9-10). My approach-similar to that of Julia Dahlvik (2018) and Tone Liodden (2016)-is, therefore, not only to study what caseworkers' discretionary practices are-thus, how caseworkers deal with their room for manoeuvre, interpret legal rules when "applying" them, assemble cases and produce the necessary "facts" for taking decisions-but also to analyse ethnographically the different factors that shape these discretionary practices. As I will show in this book, the concept of the institutional habitus provides a unique way of doing so by drawing attention to the unthinking, routine and self-evident actions and judgements of decision-makers and how they come to adopt such dispositions through institutional socialisation.…”

“…Building on this broad body of literature, I argue that we must therefore also pay attention to other factors-beyond written (legal) rules-that shape administrative caseworkers' everyday practices. Such factors include organisational socialisation, the ideological environments in which administrations and their officials work, professional norms and values, embodied knowledge and routines as well as decisional pragmatism (see also Alpes and Spire 2014;Dahlvik 2018;Eckert 2020;Eule et al 2019;Fassin and Kobelinsky 2012;Heyman 2004;Johannesson 2017;Jubany 2017;Liodden 2016;Miaz 2017;Mountz 2010;Poertner 2018;Probst 2012). However, at the same time, we should not underestimate the role that rules play in guiding administrative work.…”

Le Droit et ses médiations

“…Dans les années 2000 et 2010, plusieurs travaux se sont intéressés aux politiques d'asile et d'immigration « par le bas », en partant des pratiques des fonctionnaires ou des juges, de leurs interactions avec les étrangers, ou encore de l'expérience et des récits de ces derniers, et cela dans différents pays : aux États-Unis (Bohmer et Shuman, 2008 ;Schoenholtz et al, 2014), au Canada (Barsky, 1994 ;Rousseau et al, 2002 ;Soennecken, 2013 ;Tomkinson, 2015), en Australie (Hamlin, 2012 ;, en Grande-Bretagne (Good, 2007 ;Bohmer et Shuman, 2008 ;Jubany, 2011 ;Kelly, 2012), en France (Greselier, 2007 ;Valluy, 2009 ;Probst, 2011 ;Fassin et Kobelinsky, 2012 ;Akoka et Spire, 2013 ;Kobelinsky, 2013), en Espagne (Jubany, 2011 ;, en Allemagne (Probst, 2011 ;Eule, 2014 ;Lahusen et Schneider, 2016 ;Schittenhelm et Schneider, 2017), en Autriche (Dahlvik, 2018), ou encore en Suisse (Fresia et al, 2013 ;Affolter, 2016 ;Miaz, 2017a ;2017b ;Poertner, 2017). Ces recherches ont montré que la politique d'immigration et la politique des frontières se concrétisent localement aux guichets des ambassades et des consulats pour la délivrance des visas (Infantino, 2010 ;Alpes et Spire, 2014), ainsi qu'au sein des administrations locales (Spire, 2008 ;Eule, 2014).…”