
Dr Joel White
Job Title
Teaching Fellow

Research interests
Research interests
Political anthropology, immigration detention, care, solidarity, anti-racism, friendship, housing, Activism, Kinship, borders, carcerality, social movement history, prison abolition, Immigration and asylum policy, work, social reproduction, trauma, care work, medical care, colonialism and imperialism
Background
Biographical Statement
Joel White is based in Glasgow and recently gained his PhD at Edinburgh University with a dissertation entitled 'Holding Space: Friendship, Care and Carcerality in the UK Immigration Detention System.' He works closely with a number of groups in Glasgow that organise around mutual aid, migrant solidarity and anti-racism. Joel has also been involved with the Arika and Counterflows festivals, occasionally does music and journalistic writing, and helps run a small record label called GLARC. He teaches on the Empires, 1B: Anthropology Matters and Happiness courses. He is currently working on projects to do with revolutionary friendship, social movement memory, histories of deportation resistance, and colonial prisons.
Published writing
04.04.22 Vicarious strength: friends and befriending in UK immigration detention - Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) Blog
03.08.2021: Criminalising Solidarity - Tribune Magazine
02.05.2021: The Border Business - Tribune Magazine
21.12.2020: Priti Patel’s Asylum Prisons - Tribune Magazine
Winter 2020: Whose law is it anyway? - Review of Nadine El-Enany's (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire - Radical Philosophy
20.06.20 : The Fight for Asylum Seeker Rights Behind Glasgow’s Protests - Tribune Magazine
Papers / Presentations
02.04.21 |
Becoming complicit in the UK ‘hostile environment’ People navigating the ‘hostile environment’ in Glasgow encounter and articulate multiple forms of complicity. ‘Thinking like’ the Home Office can here mean risking complicity in one’s own harm, along with questioning the complicity of others: NGO workers, campaign groups, and academic researchers. Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) Conference - Panel: Complicities: politics and ethics at the edges of responsibility - St Andrews / Online |
11.09.20 |
Imagining Abolition On sci-fi prisons and prison abolitionist organising. London Science Fiction Research Community: 'Beyond Borders' Conference - Panel: Collective Struggle, Collective Joy - London / Online |
25.06.20 |
Locked Out: disappearance and visibility in UK Asylum housing struggles European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Conference - Panel: Disappearances at the margins of the state: migration, intimacy and politics - Lisbon / Online |
26.09.19 | Guest Lecture: Asylum and Immigration detention - Asylum and Refugee Law and Policy Course - The University of Edinburgh |
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Works within
Staff Hours and Guidance
Thursdays 3-5pm, please email in advance for a Teams Appointment.