The political mobilities of reporting: tethering, slickness and asylum control

Daniel X.O. Fisher, Andrew Burridge and Nick Gill

Mobilities, 2019, vol. 14, issue 5, 632-647

Abstract: This paper focuses on the coerced mobilities associated with reporting, meaning the mandatory requirement to regularly check-in with authorities for the purpose of control. Drawing on recent calls for a politics of mobility and advances in carceral geographies, we attend to the forces, movements, speeds and affective materialities of reporting with a focus on deportable migrants and the UK Home Office. In doing so we develop two conceptual lenses through which to further understand the politics of mobility. First, we develop the concept of ‘slickness’ in the context of the process of becoming detained at a reporting event. We understand slickness as a property of bodies and objects that makes them easier to move. Second, we argue that reporting functions to ‘tether’ deportable migrants; thereby not only fixing them in place, but also forcing the expenditure of energy and the experience of punishment. The result is that reporting blurs the distinction between detention and ‘freedom’ by enacting the carceral in everyday spaces.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2019.1607049 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:14:y:2019:i:5:p:632-647

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1607049

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().