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Immigration detention and the racialized governance of illegality in the United Kingdom

Turnbull, Sarah (2017) Immigration detention and the racialized governance of illegality in the United Kingdom. Social Justice 44 (1), ISSN 1043-1578.

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Abstract

This article examines immigration detention as a racialized practice of governing illegality in the United Kingdom (UK). It aims to respond to the call of scholars such as Bowling (2013), Parmar (2016), and Garner (2015) for criminology to explicitly engage with the racialized nature of contemporary practices of border control. In so doing, it represents an attempt to directly address the most salient observation from my multi-sited ethnography of immigration detention in the UK: that detention is a racist practice. The article considers the value of ethnography for understanding and conceptualizing race and racism “on the ground” in this unique carceral context, arguing that to make sense of immigration detention and the governance of il/legality, it is necessary to bring issues of race and racism to the fore. Doing so enables us to better challenge and denaturalize detention as a logical governmental response to mass migration and concerns about (national) security.

Metadata

Item Type: Article
Keyword(s) / Subject(s): immigration detention, ethnography, United Kingdom, race, racialization, illegality
School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Law School
Depositing User: Sarah Turnbull
Date Deposited: 04 Dec 2017 09:17
Last Modified: 29 Jul 2025 23:51
URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/20508

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