Full Description
Michelle Peterie's revealing research offers a fresh angle on the human costs of immigration detention.
Drawing on over 70 interviews with regular visitors to Australia's onshore immigration detention facilities, Peterie paints a unique and vivid picture of these carceral spaces. The book contrasts the care and friendship exchanged between detainees and visitors with the isolation and despair that is generated and weaponised through institutional life. It shows how visitors become targets of institutional control, and theorises the harm detention imposes beyond the detainee.
As the first research in this area, this book bears important witness to Australia's onshore immigration detention system, and offers internationally relevant insights on immigration, deterrence and the politics of solidarity.
Contents
Introduction: Studying Immigration Detention
Immigration Detention in Australia
Theorizing Detention Centres as Prisons
Bureaucratic Violence
Witnessing the Pains of Imprisonment
Care and Resistance
Forced Relocations
Reverberating Harms
Conclusion: Tacit Intentionality and the Weaponization of Despair
