This article documents the experiences of volunteer visitors to Australia's onshore immigration detention facilities, and considers what they reveal about the operation of power within this detention ...network. While immigration detention systems (including Australia's) have received considerable academic attention in recent years, few scholars have examined the experiences of volunteers. Further, while the existing scholarship points to the negative impacts of immigration detention on detainees, the question of how these outcomes are produced at the level of daily institutional life has gone largely unanswered. The testimonies presented here provide a valuable window onto daily life in Australia's onshore immigration detention centres, highlighting the opaque and capricious mechanisms through which they produce emotional distress in both asylum seekers and their supporters. In documenting these mechanisms and their effects, this article shows how 'deterrence' is enacted through the small and seemingly innocuous details of institutional life.
The relationship between immigration detention and trauma is well established, and scholars have often employed Agamben’s notion of the camp to explain the psychological deterioration that ...asylum-seekers experience in detention. Using Australia as a case study, this article argues that while the camp model is highly instructive in some contexts (such as Australia’s offshore processing facilities), it is less useful in understanding facilities that are ostensibly bound by social and legal constraints (such as Australia’s onshore detention facilities). Detention centres such as those on the Australian mainland, this article demonstrates, are best understood not as camps but as prisons. In making this claim, this article opens up a rich body of empirical and theoretical research regarding the operation of power – and, in particular, the infliction of psychological pain – in carceral institutions. In doing so, it provides a theoretical scaf-folding for understanding how immigration detention facilities can and do inflict harm in situations where governments must maintain an appearance of civility and respect for the law. Furthermore, it provides a grounding and vocabulary for understanding outcomes such as trauma and mental illness not as failures of immigration detention systems, but as some of their core functions.
In recent decades, there has been a global rise in fear and hostility towards asylum seekers. Xenophobia - or 'fear of the stranger' - has become a pressing issue in a range of disciplines. Several ...causal models have been proposed to explain this fear and the hostility it produces. However, disciplinary boundaries have limited productive dialogue between these approaches. This article draws connections between four of the main theories that have been advanced in the existing literature: (1) false belief accounts, (2) xenophobia as new racism, (3) sociobiological explanations and (4) xenophobia as an effect of capitalist globalisation. While this article cannot provide an exhaustive review of theories of xenophobia, it aims to present a useful comparative introduction to current research into the social aspects of xenophobia, particularly as these theories have been applied to asylum seekers. In bringing together divergent models, it also invites interdisciplinary engagement.
Contemporary governments employ a range of policy tools to ‘activate’ the unemployed to look for work. Framing unemployment as a consequence of personal shortcoming, these policies incentivise the ...unemployed to become ‘productive’ members of society. While Foucault’s governmentality framework has been used to foreground the operation of power within these policies, ‘job-seeker’ resistance has received less attention. In particular, forms of emotional resistance have rarely been studied. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed welfare recipients in Australia, this article shows that many unemployed people internalise activation’s discourses of personal failure, experiencing shame and worthlessness as a result. It also reveals, however, that a significant minority reject this framing and the ‘feeling rules’ it implies, expressing not shame but anger regarding their circumstances. Bringing together insights from resistance studies and the sociology of emotions, this article argues that ‘job-seeker’ anger should be recognised as an important form of ‘everyday resistance’.
Social networks play an important role in helping people find employment, yet extant studies have argued that unemployed ‘job-seekers’ rarely engage in ‘networking’ behaviours. Previous explanations ...of this inactivity have typically focused on individual factors such as personality, knowledge and attitude, or suggested that isolation occurs because individuals lose access to the latent benefits of employment. Social stigma has been obscured in these debates, even as they have perpetuated stereotypes regarding individual responsibility for unemployment and the inherent value of paid work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 80 unemployed Australians, this article argues that stigma-related shame is an important factor in networking decisions. First, it demonstrates that stigma is ubiquitous in the lives of the unemployed. Second, it identifies withdrawal from social networks and disassociation from ‘the unemployed’ as two key strategies that unemployed people use to manage stigma-related shame, and shows how these strategies reduce networking activities.
Harm is a recurring theme in the social sciences. Scholars in a range of empirical areas have documented the deleterious outcomes that at times emerge from social structures, institutions and systems ...of governance. Yet these harms have often been presented under the rubric of ‘unintended consequences’. The outcomes of systems are designed to appear devoid of intentionality, in motion without any clear agency involved, and are thus particularly adept at evading accountability structures and forms of responsibility. Drawing insights from decades of social theory – as well as three illustrative examples from Australia's health, welfare and immigration systems – this article argues that many social structures are in fact intended to cause harm, but designed not to appear so. In presenting this argument, we offer a theoretical framework for conceptualising harm as actively administered. We also challenge scholars from across the social sciences to reconsider the partially depoliticising narrative of ‘unintended consequences’, and to be bolder in naming the intended harms that permeate social life, often serving powerful political and economic interests.
Conditional welfare policies are frequently underpinned by pejorative representations of those they target. Vulnerable children, under physical or moral threat from their welfare-dependent parents, ...are a mainstay of these constructions, yet the nuances of this trope have received little focused attention. Through a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates at the introduction of compulsory income management (CIM) to Australia, this article explores the complexities of the vulnerable child trope. It shows how the figure of the child was leveraged to justify hard-line welfare reforms in Australia, and offers a deeper and more intersectional understanding of how social and economic marginalisation is reproduced through welfare discourse.
New Zealand recipients of the Youth Payment and Young Parent Payment, who are disproportionally Indigenous Māori and sole mothers, must participate in ‘Money Management’. This form of income ...management restricts spending, monitors financial transactions and requires compulsory budgeting education. Drawing on interviews with Money Management participants, Youth Service mentors and policymakers, this article argues that Money Management aims to responsibilise young people through conditional welfare, rather than improve their long-term financial capability as articulated. This becomes obvious through analysis of how Money Management ignores: 1) New Zealand financial literacy education policy developments, 2) the literature on best practice in financial literacy education and how values about money and wealth are shaped by 3) Māori world views and 4) gendered norms. The article concludes that states should take more responsibility, by increasing social security incomes and better regulating the financial, labour and housing markets, to ensure the financial capacity of their citizens.
This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ...ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating ‘emotional sharing’ and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the ‘politics of fear’ around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology.
Welfare reforms have swept across most liberal-democratic nations over recent decades, carried by a deep neoliberal faith in market rationality and an intensive focus on the individual as a key site ...of disciplinary intervention. These reforms have been accompanied by discourses within which welfare, deviance and crime are interwoven tightly. Australia’s Income Management (IM) policies, which “quarantine” a portion of welfare income as a means of behavioral conditionality, provide an example of welfare policy that has been promoted as a way of reducing crime. In this article, we interrogate these claims. We find little support for the policy logic linking IM and crime, and we demonstrate that there is no clear evidence that IM
has
reduced crime. Instead, we argue that the overwhelming focus of IM on poor and racialized subjects serves to socially construct crime as a metaphor for justifying the harmful “double punitive regulation” of the state. This sees the state’s left hand (i.e., social functions, including workfare) and right hand (i.e., punitive functions, including prisonfare) work together to turn poor (and mainly Indigenous) populations into marketized subjects, while punishing those who resist, through a range of governing techniques.
PDF
