The scene and the unseen: Neglect and death in immigration detention and aged care

Abstract

Institutional confinement is paradoxically characterised by intense surveillance, while those confined are often rendered invisible as persons of value and agency. Our capacity to ‘see’ violence in such sites can also be harder to discern when it is the manifestation of neglect: not so much as mistreatment but untreatment, the failure to act. Drawing on Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Agamben's conceptualisation of the exception and abandonment, I propose that the deaths resulting from the untreated skin wounds of Annunziata Nancy Santoro, in aged care, and those of Hamid Khazaei, in immigration detention, are the effect of their location in what I call ‘zones of neglect’. Whether in places of care or punishment, neglect functions here as a form of power, in which responsibility for suffering paradoxically recedes from view. This analysis contributes to a growing body of research on quasi-carceral sites that sit uneasily along a continuum of care and control.

Necropolitics as accumulation: Enforcement and enclosure in Brisbane during COVID-19

“…I do so with the recognition that there is significant diversity within these groups and that there is no single migrant, Indigenous, or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander identity. To bring together Indigenous and migrant racialized violence is not to ignore the forms of state violence felt across those pushed to the fringes of mainstream society, including disabled, elderly, and homeless populations, for whom the tolls of COVID-19 have also been extreme ( Australian Royal Commission, 2020 ; Loughnan, 2022 ). Rather, drawing these experiences together better exposes ‘colonialism's multiple, uneven yet interlocking, violences' ( Vimalassery et al, 2016 ).…”

“…Outright killing might result in legal challenges against facilities, government agencies, and corporate contractors, not to mention bad press. Rather, hyper profit is made from slow death, a form of toxic exposure, which is not always so directly perceptible ( Davies, 2022 ; Loughnan, 2022 ). Yet despite this, the catastrophic numbers of Indigenous and migrant deaths reveal the effects of social death and specific conditions of confinement that are disproportionately experienced by Black and Brown populations.…”

Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance

“…To police and control the imaginary borders of the nation as a white space, the settler colonial state uses techniques of erasure, extraction and surveillance that create spaces of disappearance (Banivanua Mar, 2016; McQuire, 2019; Mirzoeff, 2021). These spaces include prisons and youth detention centres that overwhelmingly target First Nations people, and immigration detention centres and APODs for racialised non-citizens that become trapped (through enclosure or exclusion) by the border (Loughnan, 2022; Morris, 2023; O’Donnell, 2022). Together, they comprise a ‘carceral archipelago’ (Foucault, 1991) that is embedded in colonial genealogies of racial-spatial control (McKinnon, 2020; Perera and Pugliese, 2018).…”

“…In detention, non-citizens are subject to particularly intense forms of surveillance and exposure that, paradoxically, render them ‘invisible as persons of value and agency’ (Loughnan, 2022). Thus, rather than totalising spaces of disappearance, authoritative attempts to control of the visibility and audibility of detention, and of other flows of information about asylum seekers’ experiences (Boon-Kuo, 2022), can variously function to hide, normalise, or legitimise the structural and epistemic violence of indefinite detention (Loughnan, 2020; Mountz, 2015; O’Donnell, 2022).…”

Reparations for people living with dementia: Recognition, accountability, change, now!

“…Harm experienced by people living with dementia in LTC institutions is a systemic and structural problem. It is facilitated by environmental factors (including geography and architecture), economic, legal and regulatory frameworks, and taken for granted aspects of how LTC institutions operate (Loughnan, 2022; Steele et al, 2019). It is grounded in stigma towards dementia and ableism and ageism towards people living with dementia (Steele et al, 2023).…”