Feeling difference: Race, migration, and the affective infrastructure of a Danish detention camp

Abstract

Migration-related detention, the administrative incarceration of people lacking legal authorisation to remain, has become a standardised technique used by states to violently regulate and discipline undesired mobility. As carceral junctions, migration detention camps serve to identify, confine, symbolically punish and expel people deemed ‘out of place’ in the national order of things. As bordering mechanisms, they are techniques of sorting and controlling populations, and sites where we can observe the enforcement of state racism. These processes of racialisation and expulsion operate corporally and affectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers working inside Denmark's migration-related detention camp, and engaging with the literature on race, emotion and border criminology, the article traces the role of racial affect in forging the identities of people interacting inside the camp. It demonstrates how prison officers’ racialised suspicion, compromised compassion, and passionate nationalism partake in making incarcerated migrants into expellable subjects, and in ordering them in accordance with matrices of racial differentiation. The officers’ emotions, I argue, should be understood as part of the camp's infrastructure, and productive for the border regime.

Reinscribing Migrant “Undeservingness” and “Deportability” Into Detention Centres' Visiting Rooms

“…Contributing to the studies (Bosworth, 2019;Lindberg, 2022) detailing emotions and attitudes of officers implementing detention and deportation policies, this study provides insights into the racial affect that is experienced and resisted differently by actors involved in relations of power characterising detention centres. More research with same ethnicity/race visitors of detained persons will contribute to this understanding, but more importantly, research addressing detained persons' experiences of and resistances to race and racism is needed to shed better light on operations of race and how it shapes everyday interactions and relations in those sites of abuse.…”

“…Over the years, the neglect, forms of violence, abuse, and migrant deaths inside British immigration detention centres, officially termed immigration removal centres (IRCs), have increasing news coverage in connection with racism. Yet, despite racist language and abuse being exposed, issues of race and racism have often been downplayed in public discussions about immigration detention and deportation, and have not been adequately recognised within the critical scholarship on border(ing) practices (exceptions include Bhatia, 2020a;Lindberg, 2022;Singh Bhui, 2016;Turnbull, 2017). One possible reason for this neglect has been that there is no skin colour, religion, or language that unites the population that IRCs hold and racism is often defined very narrowly as an intentional and mostly colour-coded act of discrimination, a line of argument that continuously occupies a central place in justifications of race-neutrality in bordering practices (de Noronha, 2019).…”

‘Little prisons’: Revisiting trajectories and carcerality in a Danish asylum camp

“…The centres they live in tend to be located in rural or provincial areas. There are specific places dedicated to failed or rejected asylum seekers that are detention-like in nature (see Lindberg, 2022;Kohl, 2022). However, the place described in this article is what would be characterised as a 'normal residential centre'.…”

Accommodation centres for asylum seekers as sites of conflict and collaboration: Strategies for the prevention of violence

“…As Kreichauf (2017) demonstrates for Germany, Denmark and Greece, the campization of refugee accommodation blurs the lines among its various functions of reception, accommodation and detention by condensing different functions into one spatial arrangement. Following the same crimigrative logic, the management and operation of many of these sites directly borrow from and rely on the operation of prisons, with formal ties and exchange of workforce and practices between these institutions (Lindberg, 2022). As a result, many reception camps, some of the purportedly least punitive sites [in terms of function], produce prison-like conditions (Jakobsen, 2022;Whyte et al, 2021).…”