Solidarity in spaces of ‘care and custody’: The hospitality politics of immigration detention visiting
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619887163 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
887163TCR0010.1177/1362480619887163Theoretical CriminologyKemp
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Article
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(2) 249 –267
Solidarity in spaces of ‘care
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619887163
DOI: 10.1177/1362480619887163
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politics of immigration
detention visiting
Tom Kemp
Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Abstract
This article contributes to criminological understanding of immigration detention
by highlighting volunteer visiting as a space of embodied thinking about critical
responses to the burgeoning crimmigration system. It draws from interview
material with volunteer visitors and people held in immigration detention centres
to assess conceptual relevance of critical hospitality studies for anti-border
practice. Both within Derridean scholarship on hospitality and in social-discourses
on migration, host/citizen and guest/migrant identifications are understood as stable
subject positions. I argue that to support resistance to deportation and establish
mutual solidarity and cooperation in this context, detention visitors adopt multiple
strategies of hospitality that position themselves as visitors as well as hosts. By
counter-posing differing ways that volunteers occupy these roles, I show how the
copresence of divergent ways of offering hospitality allows visitors to navigate the
complicities that necessarily afflict support in solidarity with migrants in carceral
spaces of border control.
Keywords
Border activism, Derrida, detention visiting, hospitality, immigration detention
Corresponding author:
Tom Kemp, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University, Chaucer Building, Goldsmith St,
Nottingham, NG1 5LP, UK.
Email: Tom.kemp@ntu.ac.uk
250
Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
Introduction
In recent years, criminological interest in state practices that criminalize, police, detain
and deport migrants has become well established (Aas and Bosworth, 2013; Coutin,
2005). Immigration detention has been identified as a cornerstone of a distinct ‘crimmi-
gration’ system (Bowling and Westenra, 2018; Pakes and Holt, 2017; Stumpf, 2006).
Detention runs according to its own logics of estrangement and disavowal that distin-
guish it from criminal imprisonment (Bosworth, 2013; Silverman and Massa, 2012) pro-
ducing specific racialized identities and relationalities (Bosworth, 2012; Turnbull, 2017).
Movements that contest crimmigration powers also invoke distinctive normative pos-
tures; they frequently mobilize a discourse of hospitality to demand that the state and its
citizenry respect the rights of its migrant ‘guests’.
This article makes two interventions. First, it addresses debates about the role of hos-
pitality in critical responses to the UK’s border regime. Focusing on the activities of
detention visiting groups, it seeks to understand the ways the concept of hospitality can
be deployed both to critique and think alongside anti-detention activists in their attempts
to perform an emancipatory politics in and against carceral spaces of border enforce-
ment. Second, it contributes to criminological understandings of the role of private and
voluntary actors in the delivery of services and care in custody (Bales and Mears, 2008;
Moran, 2013; Tomczak, 2014) and in the logics and strategies of movements that resist
contemporary carceral politics (Lamble, 2013; Scott, 2009). The article examines the
complicity of ostensibly benevolent actors in spaces of migrant incarceration and identi-
fies strategies of subversion developed to navigate these complicities. The resulting dis-
cussion has implications for organized contestation over migration policies as well as
scholarship on the politics of care and activism in response to state violence.
The concerns of anti-border politics raise questions of hospitality in two connected
ways. The first relates to the language, presentation and demands of pro-migration cam-
paigning that frequently deploys discourses of hospitality to press for increased refugee
resettlement programmes and support for refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK.
The ‘City of Sanctuary’ movement (see Darling, 2010), in its effort to foster a positive
local response to migration, sought to change attitudes towards refugees and to create
welcoming support networks. Similarly, the Refugees Welcome movement1 has popular-
ized humanitarian responses to the so-called migrant crisis by drawing on a mythology
of British hospitality (Gibson, 2006), mobilizing sentiments of welcome for those par-
ticularly in need, pushing for the British government and people to transform from inhos-
pitable to hospitable hosts. In contesting policies and discourses that explicitly foster a
‘hostile environment’ for people with insecure immigration status that keep migrants in
the position of ‘eternal guests’ on ‘eternal probation’ (Kanstroom, 2007: 6), these pro-
jects engage with a line of cosmopolitan political thought about the state’s legal and
moral obligations towards immigrants (Baker, 2010; Brown, 2010; Friese, 2010).
The second concerns the embodied, social practices that migrant solidarity groups
carry out to support migrants. Activists working with people subject to border control
confront a constitutive tension within their work. While their activities are motivated by
the pursuit of equality, the practice of anti-border work often sustains the very demarca-
tions of difference (Friese, 2010) and the unequal distributions of agency, expertise and
Kemp
251
social capital that anti-border projects seek to challenge (Fadaee, 2015; Millner, 2011).
Work on prefigurative politics has highlighted the ways activist groups seek to reimagine
processes of democratic organizing that attempt to address internal power dynamics
(Maeckelbergh, 2011). However, horizontal interaction with people outside an organiz-
ing group who are subject to direct or indirect control by border enforcement agencies is
challenging. Critical interpretations of humanitarian and activist practices have deployed
the concept of hospitality to investigate the conflicted and ambivalent nature of this work
(Darling, 2009, 2010; Millner, 2011; Rozakou, 2012).
In these practices of campaigning and support, citizen-activists are positioned as
hosts while migrants are positioned as guests. In doing so, these discourses naturalize
dominant representations of who has ties to a place and who does not. The casting of
the migrant as the guest of the ‘host’-nation is, as Rosello (2001: 3) suggests, a ‘meta-
phor that forgot it was a metaphor’; it naturalizes the citizen’s status of belonging and
dominance in a space while emphasizing the supposed mobility and illegitimacy of the
migrant other.
Hospitality, then, is not a straightforwardly positive response to difference (Candea
and Da Col, 2012; see Lynch et al., 2011). Critical approaches, often drawing upon
Derrida’s (1997, 2005; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000) work, have articulated the
ways that hospitality involves the contradictory entwinement of openness and welcome
with closure and hostility. For some writers (Darling, 2014; Millner, 2011), the limita-
tions of hospitality politics mean that it should be rejected in favour of alternative visions
of progressive, solidaristic practices of anti-border work. However, this article argues
that, with important modifications, Derrida’s concept of hospitality helps to understand
the ways that detention visitors are experimenting with the roles of host and guest.
Detention visiting both reasserts the dominant forms of host–guest relations but also
reimagines the anti-detention volunteer role from a hosting subject to a visiting subject.
I argue that the co-presence of these divergent ways of offering hospitality allow visitors
to navigate and live with the complicities and unequal relationships afflicting solidarity
with migrants in carceral-border spaces.
The article forms part of a wider project that explores the dynamics and dilemmas
of anti-detention activism with a focus on activisms that seek collaborative relation-
ships with those resisting detention from within. The empirical basis for this article
consists of: three years’ participation in detention visiting, during which I visited 10
people in four detention centres; interviews with 14 visitors from three visiting groups;
and three interviews with people who had experience of being visited while in deten-
tion. My positionality as someone who has not been detained and has not been targeted
by immigration detention, and the weighting of interviews on activist visitors rather
than those in detention, means that the article is primarily focused on the political
thinking ongoing within detention activism rather than on attempting to provide a rep-
resentative account of detention visiting that includes accounting for the ways those in
detention experience visits. These interviews were made possible by agreement with
visiting groups I worked with, through my own networks. I have anonymized inter-
viewees using pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality and, since it is not my inten-
tion to compare the visiting practices of different groups, I have not identified which
group they visit with. My case studies included groups that viewed detention visiting
252
Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
as part of an explicitly anti-racist praxis...
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