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This paper investigates the role of admission forms in the regulation of asylum confinement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taking the Toronto Lunatic Asylum as a case study it traces the evolution of the forms' content and structure during the first decades of this institution. Admission forms provide important material for understanding the medico-legal assessment of lunacy in a certain jurisdiction. First, they show how the description of insanity depended on a plurality of actors. Second, doctors were not necessarily required to indicate symptoms of derangement. Third, patients' relatives played a fundamental role in providing clinical information. From an historiographical perspective, this paper invites scholars to consider the function of standardized documents in shaping the written identity of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper proposes to revisit and expand the analytical vocabulary of script analysis to understand what comes to count as data, what forms of data come to matter and how "drawing data together" reconfigures power and agency at Europe's borders. Empirically, we analyze controversies about the practices of asylum decision-making and age assessment in Greece. We show that agency of "users" is unequally distributed through anticipations of subscription and dis-inscription, while asylum seekers are conscripted within security scripts that restrict their agency. Moreover, as a multiplicity of inscriptions are produced, migrants' claims can be disqualified through circumscriptions of data and ascriptions of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma-informed (T-I) approaches to working with vulnerable people have gained popularity in practice but are rarely used in academic research and little is known about the challenges of conducting a T-I approach to participatory research. This paper reflects on our experiences of a participatory peer research project involving unaccompanied young people seeking asylum (16–25 years) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst the project adhered to a robust ethical framework, it became apparent at an early stage in the empirical phase that our methods needed to acknowledge and accommodate the trauma of those involved in the project much more thoughtfully and effectively than our ethical framework suggested. With this in mind, we set about identifying the key elements of a T-I approach to research and how these might add value to research with vulnerable and marginalised populations. Our model of a T-I approach to peer research is framed around five core principles: working reflectively with those with lived experience; contextualising trauma; nurturing trust; showing care; and empowering those involved in and affected by the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma-informed (T-I) approaches to working with vulnerable people have gained popularity in practice but are rarely used in academic research and little is known about the challenges of conducting a T-I approach to participatory research. This paper reflects on our experiences of a participatory peer research project involving unaccompanied young people seeking asylum (16-25 years) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst the project adhered to a robust ethical framework, it became apparent at an early stage in the empirical phase that our methods needed to acknowledge and accommodate the trauma of those involved in the project much more thoughtfully and effectively than our ethical framework suggested. With this in mind, we set about identifying the key elements of a T-I approach to research and how these might add value to research with vulnerable and marginalised populations. Our model of a T-I approach to peer research is framed around five core principles: working reflectively with those with lived experience; contextualising trauma; nurturing trust; showing care; and empowering those involved in and affected by the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does immigrant racialization look like in a context of legal inclusion? Although scholars have given notable attention to racialization in the face of illegality and exclusionary immigration regimes, less well understood are dimensions of racialization in inclusive legal contexts. Over the past decade, Brazil has experienced three major influxes of forcibly displaced people—from Haiti, Syria, and Venezuela. For each, Brazil radically expanded its asylum and immigration policies in their favor. At the same time, these groups have been disparately racialized in the public sphere. Using a content analysis of media coverage from 2010 to 2020, this paper examines the varied public racialization of Haitians, Syrians, and Venezuelans. Juxtaposing representations sheds light on the relationality of migrant racialization. It finds autonomy and capacity, belonging, and national ramification as key dimensions through which migrants are variably racialized. By interrogating these racial dimensions in the face of legal incorporation in Brazil, this study complicates the relationship between racialization, Othering, and legal status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses what it means to live with acutely restricted access to the city in the process of seeking urban asylum in post-apartheid South Africa. Our concept of apportionment specifies the gendered and racialised diminishment of space and time in the context of exclusionary and everyday violence. We focus on how the delineation and reduction of space and time is feminised, through the working lives of refugee and asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in Cape Town. Their embodied experiences incorporate the resonance of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, further sharpening their careful movements across Cape Town's segregated geographies. Drawing on our conversations with non-governmental organisations and self-employed women over a nine-month period in 2020, we highlight how the deferral of refuge compounds precarity, significantly affecting women and those who are sexually minoritised. In connecting how state apportionment maps onto urban apportionment we reveal how an ecology of violence – of spatialised segregation, xenophobia and sexual violence – establishes a corporeal power that constrains access to the city. Crucially, these women deploy counter practices of apportionment and their precisely attuned navigations add to our understanding of the agile repertoires of working the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of efforts to harmonize asylum procedures, large unexplained differences in asylum outcomes persist across European Union member states. Unfortunately, relatively little empirical literature has examined the causes of disparities in asylum recognition rates. In this paper, I suggest that domestic politics impact how asylum claims are adjudicated. I analyze origin-specific asylum recognition rates in 27 European Union member states from 2000-2018. The findings show that right-wing parties in government are associated with lower asylum recognition rates. This effect is strongest for far-right parties. When far-right parties gain legislative seats and cabinet positions, there is a substantive reduction in recognized asylum claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a collection of objects deliberately concealed beneath the verandah of a ward for middle-class, female, paying patients at Australia's longest continuously operating mental health institution, the Royal Derwent Hospital in Tasmania. Cached in small discrete mounds across an area of some 50 square metres, the collection was probably concealed in the mid-20th century and contains over 1000 items of clothing, ephemera and other objects dating from 1880 to the mid-1940s. In achieving a possessional territory of such magnitude, this patient achieved a level of personal self-expression that is rarely encountered archaeologically, particularly within an institutional context. Analysis of this collection as an 'underlife' illuminates both functional aspects of the hospital and the hopes and desires of this particular, though still anonymous, patient and her vibrant world of things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, which is empirically grounded in ethnographic research conducted among persons living in Norway without legal permission, we explore the temporal dimensions of irregular migration. In the first half, we consider the time aspects of migration control. In particular, we examine the politicization of time within the host of b/ordering policies, practices, and processes through which migrant irregularity is produced and governed in the Norwegian welfare state. We then move into a discussion of migrant irregularity as it is subjectively experienced, in which we solicit time as fundamental unit of analysis with the potential to render phenomenologically intelligible irregularity as it is lived and negotiated. In doing so, we draw upon two classical Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos, and we consider the conditions of limitation and possibility for reckoning as meaningful experiences of and in time. This entails an exploration of the ways in which the research participants had emplotted their experiences within narratives that they, in retrospect, recalled having crafted at various points in their lives, and of the existential dilemmas that they confronted when these narratives could no longer be sustained. Ultimately, these endeavors produce an analysis of both these meaning-making strategies and what might be understood as the unique temporalities of irregular migration, as it is produced and governed, lived and embodied, and potentially also renegotiated and transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the unique collection of Scottish outsider art, labelled Art Extraordinary, as a window into the often neglected small spaces of asylum care in the early twentieth century. By drawing upon materials from the Art Extraordinary collection and its associated archives, this paper demonstrates the importance of incorporating small and everyday spaces of care -- such as gardens, paths, studios and boats -- into the broader historical narratives of psychiatric care in Scotland. Examples of experiential memorialization and counterpoints to asylum surveillance culture will be illuminated. The significance of using 'outsider' art collections as a valuable source in tracing geographical histories will be highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite making a substantial contribution to the development of mental health services in colonial Australia, until now the story of Dr Patrick Hill's (1794–1852) life has been overlooked by historians. This paper reviews primary sources including clinical notes, patient lists, letters, government documents and newspaper articles which reveal that Dr Hill was a dedicated physician who played a vital role in the development of Australian mental healthcare. He was held in such esteem that by the time of his sudden death in 1852 he had been elevated to the most senior medical office in New South Wales. Dr Hill's career serves to exemplify how the local practice of individual colonial doctors helped build the reputation of medicine in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers queer refugeeism from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK in relation to the political economy of (im)mobility in and out of the Caribbean. Gay rights have been embraced by liberal democracies as the newest form of human rights, what has been called "homonationalism." Mirroring other double-binds of liberal inclusion, I show how queer asylum-seekers get caught betwixt and between two globally-stratified homonationalisms while confronting the realpolitik of European asylum law not only as queer refugees but also in terms of transnational social mobility otherwise unavailable to them. The British asylum system therefore materializes as a bordering operation that more often than not denies lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) asylum-seekers their rights under the sign of their humanitarian protection. I consider whether homonationalisms everywhere—as assemblages of human rights discourse—should be thought of as "post-political" projects, a concept critical to growing bodies of political theory and cultural critique. This is because humanitarianism touts "rights" as universal and moral, therefore transcending the political. However, as a result of their practical effects, I show how the institutional practices deemed post-political in the case at hand should be understood as attempts to deflect and defuse the underlying politics of socioeconomic status and mobility at stake, and that the conflicts and contradictions at the heart of queer asylum-seeking represent the return of the repressed political within legal-technical spaces of disagreement. I also scrutinize the ambivalent entanglements of "expertise" when anthropologists are solicited as country experts in legal asylum cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) is increasing, and unlike those who arrive with their parents, UASC are subject to interview to determine refugee status. The limited amount of objective evidence available in most asylum claims means that the UASC’s account of their experiences often becomes key in deciding whether or not the young person is granted protection. Research indicates that assumptions about human memory influence decision-makers’ views on asylum seekers’ accounts; however, these do not necessarily appear to fit with the published research on autobiographical memory and may lead to an unfair decision. Therefore, understanding the nature and limitations of autobiographical memory is key to a fair refugee determination process. A literature review of published research on autobiographical memory among adolescents was undertaken across four databases. In total, 45 papers were identified which were thematically organised into three areas: development of autobiographical memory, contextual influences and impact of psychopathology. From this review, conclusions are drawn about what can be reasonably expected of an adolescent’s autobiographical memory generally and more specifically when the unique characteristics of UASC are taken into account. We also discusss how commonly used credibility indicators in refugee status determinations for minors are problematic in light of this research. It is important that the psychological evidence on the nature of autobiographical memory in adolescents is considered in asylum processing of UASC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: that of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the paper opens by offering a governmental reading of letters as things which define the limits of present and future actions, whilst fixing individuals to specific locations. The paper then destabilises such a reading by considering how letters are understood through material-discursive entanglements of things, discourses, and spaces, such that letters are understood through, and help to constitute, different atmospheres, spaces, and subjectivities of asylum. Thus I argue that it is by taking seriously the connections between materials, discourses, and affective states that we might critically interrogate framings of the state as an oppressive force shaping the lives of those seeking asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Sheffield was the UK's first 'City of Sanctuary', an identification which suggested that the city would act to welcome asylum seekers and refugees through promoting a 'culture of hospitality'. In this paper I seek to interrogate such claims and explore how the promotion of a language of hospitality marks a form of 'moral urbanism' through which the city is linked to specific values and obligations that enable the governmental ordering of responses to asylum. In exploring public statements, media discussions, and interview accounts of asylum in the city, I argue that a normative account of how to live with asylum is articulated, one which establishes expectations of both citizens and noncitizens alike. The paper opens by tracing this narrative construction of Sheffield as a place with a 'welcoming tradition' through a series of high-profile events of refuge and their reiterative embedding in the public imaginary. I then question this account through demonstrating how such moments of welcome are conditioned by logics of acceptability and control, before considering how the governmental entanglements of moral urbanism might be contested through a politics of critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I demonstrate that the adjudication of sexual orientation asylum is one of the processes made possible under what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism. I make an analytical distinction between cases that employ a narrative of ‘the homosexual’ versus other less (homo)normative sexual identities. In the asylum system ‘the homosexual’ is a unitary and fixed identity characterized by visibility, coherence and linearity. These features, notably, are consistent with a homonormative identity construction, which privileges white, Western, gay male sexual politics. My analysis indicates that applicants that can adopt the narrative of ‘the homosexual’ have greater success than applicants’ identities that are not easily encapsulated by this single narrative. Moreover, applicants must also show an infliction of bodily harm to signify a need for asylum; the treatment of their bodies in their country of origin must vary significantly from the protection that the United States purports to offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children’s rights to asylum have emerged as an urgent political challenge. This article uses a number of cases discussed in Sweden’s largest morning paper to analyse claims of asylum-seeking children and how these claims challenge the normative limits of contemporary asylum, concerning what and who ought to be recognized by law. Even though the universality of the child constitutes a running theme, the arguments and the conception of children underpinning the claims are diverse. The article suggests that the claiming of rights as a socio-political practice could be a vital analytical approach to studying children’s rights and offers a much needed alternative to the dominant mainstreaming paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper puts queer theory’s “subjectless critique” of identity to work in challenging the state’s biopolitical use of essential, authentic identities in asylum law and practice. It not only builds upon, but also departs from existing scholarship that calls on state actors to recognize a wider range of forms of gender and sexual diversity that make people vulnerable to persecution. By contrast, I investigate how the practices of “destination” countries produce asylums-seekers as dispossessed, deportable, precarious queers, regardless of sexual identity or practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with asylum-seekers and their supporters in Toronto, Canada, I highlight the waiting room as one type of material and metaphorical space that produces asylum-seekers as liminal queer subjects. I argue that approaching queerness as precarity, rather than lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identity or even sexual and gender diversity, provides alternative and expansive ethical horizons for queer and migration politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent innovations in the way the concept of the state is employed by geographers researching forced migrants’ and refugees’ experiences. A still-dominant body of thought tends to essentialize the state and foreground both its institutional forms and coercive powers by asking questions that take the primacy of these attributes for granted. In response, poststructuralist geographers and sociologists have begun to forge alternative views of states, drawing upon a useful cynicism over the coherence of the state, as well as an engagement with Foucauldian notions of governmentality. The paper examines these alternative approaches in order to distil the characteristics of an emerging critical asylum geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discursive construction of refugees and asylum seekers (and to a lesser extent immigrants and migrants) in a 140-million-word corpus of UK press articles published between 1996 and 2005. Taking a corpus-based approach, the data were analyzed not only as a whole, but also with regard to synchronic variation, by carrying out concordance analyses of keywords which occurred within tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, and diachronic change, albeit mainly approached from an unusual angle, by investigating consistent collocates and frequencies of specific terms over time. The analyses point to a number of (mainly negative) categories of representation, the existence and development of nonsensical terms (e.g., illegal refugee), and media confusion and conflation of definitions of the four terms under examination. The paper concludes by critically discussing the extent to which a corpus-based methodological stance can inform critical discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is informed by Furse's practice as a theatre maker in two fields of output that are connected by two factors: first, the presence of the woman patient - hysteric/subfertile respectively - within the clinical gaze; second, the significance of the womb to each pathology. In the treatment of each (explored in Furse's theatre), lens based technologies play their part, whilst the cultural and medical can be seen to have overlapped to produce specific meaning with regard to Her body and its spectacularity. The article presents an overview of some of the key issues in precisely how the woman's body becomes spectacular within this prosthetic medical gaze and how the medical - and theatrically designed spaces to represent these - become meaningful and potent proxemics that in turn inform medical/ theatrical spectatorship. Overarching nineteenth-century protocols at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (where Furse's Augustine (Big Hysteria) is set) to contemporary imaging technologies used in the treatment of subfertility with Assisted Reproduction Technologies (the topic of her Art of A.R.T. projects), it examines the way in which photography develops through cinema to X-Ray, ultrasound and then 3D/4D ultrasound to 'capture' the woman's body in ways by which she becomes muted and exposed. These occular technologies that extend the gaze, first to an exterior subject and then, eventually, traversing the flesh without knife, lend specific performativity to the 'patient' women, within the context of hysterias and reproductive impairments respectively. Finally, issues of suspension of disbelief are addressed. The spectator's faith in the screen-based image of Her spectacular body is interrupted in Furse's work, which is also keenly interested in the effect of such imagery on the woman's sense of Self. The historical and cultural leaps in this article argue that there is indeed a trajectory through the history of medical imaging since the first application of photography to anatomy to the more advanced scoping technologies of medical imaging today, and that in each era, the production of these images remain fraught with cultural implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of the village of Athens, Ohio, in the founding and operation of the Athens Lunatic Asylum during the nineteenth century. It focuses on paper focuses on the function of the Athens Lunatic Asylum as a participant in the economy of its surrounding community. It is noted that the Athens Lunatic Asylum was connected with its community, functioning as a market for local goods and services as well as an employer.