| dc.description.abstract | Recent decades have seen the expansion and intensification of immigration detention practices across the globe. The resulting system of dispersed, yet interlinked sites of enforcement forms a carceral archipelago, characterised by violence and enforced isolation. However, these are also sites of transversal connection, action, and resistance. Detained people have long drawn on varied repertoires of resistance as well as performative acts of communication to challenge detention regimes. This thesis examines heterogeneous moments of struggle related to Australian and British immigration detention regimes widely understood, from hunger strikes on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and Yarl’s Wood in the United Kingdom, to works of art and literature created in detention, to struggles over housing in Melbourne and Glasgow. Taken together, these seemingly disconnected acts of resistance reveal the worldwide dimensions of the carceral archipelago, and its multiplication of borders and divisions. Through their struggles, people subject to the detention regime draw our attention to the kinds of logics, structures and practices that shape the carceral archipelago, putting them in the context of (neo)colonial histories of fragmentation and dispossession and the predations of contemporary capitalism. Not only do people in detention understand the daily mechanisms of this regime from a perspective others cannot, in their struggles they disrupt the routine workings of power and bring it to light. They provoke reactions and in doing so force power to reveal itself. What at first might appear random or isolated is revealed to be connected. And acts that might appear to be contained within sites of exclusion instead travel across boundaries and borders to activate spaces and produce political subjectivities far beyond the context of detention itself. In this way struggles in detention do not simply reveal the contours of the carceral archipelago. They also reveal and produce a counter-archipelago of resistance and solidarity. | en_US |
