Does the body matter? Determining the right to asylum and the corporeality of political communication

Abstract

Analyses of political agency often take the Habermasian notion of an ideal speech situation and its related discourse ethics as the ultimate model of politically relevant communication. Our examination of Finnish asylum officers’ perspectives on their work leads us to consider the asylum interview as an event of the political, an event of the body politic. Our interest lies in acts of communication that go beyond speech, which necessitates an engagement with the corporeal element of communication. Based on our data, we show how a focus on spoken communication alone fails to capture manifold ways in which the encounter between asylum officers and asylum applicant produces the political. We argue that taking corporeality seriously would enhance our understanding of what is at stake in this encounter and also beyond it.

Linguistic, psychological and epistemic vulnerability in asylum procedures: An interdisciplinary approach

“…Using non-verbal cues when assessing the credibility of the applicant’s account is highly problematic (Rogers et al, 2015). Yet we argue that taking note of applicants’ behaviour during the interview is necessary in order to offer interactional support (Puumala and Kynsilehto, 2016). This would enhance the quality of disclosed information.…”

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

“…For the representatives of asylum institutions, it is decisive to be able to define the nature of their own and refugees' knowledge to fit the expectations of the asylum assessment and decision making. To this end, institutional knowledge is deemed objective and thus disembodied from context, while the refugees' knowledge is seen as subjective, embodied and based on their firsthand experiences only (Jensen, 2018;Kobelinsky, 2019;Kynsilehto and Puumala, 2015;Puumala and Kynsilehto, 2016). In this sense refugees' own speech may end up being the least convincing form of knowledge, always potentially corrupted by the endeavor to be recognized as a refugee (Fassin and d'Halluin, 2005;McGhee, 2000;Häkli et al, 2017).…”

“…Status determination interviews and other practices of asylum case assessment are, indeed, illuminative of how subjectivization works to contain and manage empathy through its instrumental use as a technology of access to insider knowledge (e.g. McGhee, 2000;Fassin and d'Halluin, 2005;Puumala and Kynsilehto, 2016). The reduction here operates through asymmetric interpretation of knowledge, whereby refugees are considered now-andhere subjects with subjective knowledge only.…”

Plasma donation at the border: Feminist technoscience, bodies and race

“…Security studies and international relations more broadly have begun to turn to the role of matter in international politics, conceiving the security scene as one of a series of complex and mobile relationships between both humans and non-humans (Aradau, 2010; Mitchell, 2014; Squire, 2014; Aradau et al, 2015; Grove, 2015; Salter, 2015). The increased visibility given to new materialist approaches overlaps with a rich history of feminist security studies, where the body, and the web of relationships at work in producing the body, have been taken up as a central problematic (Briggs, 2015; Fluri, 2011; Masters, 2005; Parashar, 2013; Puumala and Kynsilehto, 2016; Puumala and Väyrynen, 2015; Wilcox, 2015). This article picks up both of these strands of concern.…”