School of Social and Political Science

Description

This paper traces how motions of carcerality structure the UK Border Regime, drawing on ethnographic research in Glasgow, Scotland. It shows how the structuring logic of immigration detention, deportation, and asylum dispersal conditions everyday life for people navigating this system, including the wider structures that follow ‘refugee status’. Here, people are pushed and pulled around different parts of the UK border infrastructure at varying scales, building their lives within the orbit of its localised nodes: Home Office reporting centres, asylum hotels, homelessness hostels, NGO offices, cafes, libraries, courts. Carcerality operates through motion here, not immobility or confinement, and people are both ‘racialized’ and ‘migrantized’ by such motion and the interpolations it enforces. In response, people navigating this system establish their own routes towards shared recognition and relationality, often entangled within the carceral systems they might partially evade, but can never be fully ‘outside’. I use the rubric of accompaniment to describe these practices, and to reflect on what it might mean to study carcerality ethnographically, not from a position of distance or duration, but by moving alongside those navigating its shifting circuits. I end by considering how an anthropology of accompaniment might contribute to contemporary anti-racist and anti-carceral struggles, at a time of far-right and nativist insurgency.