Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum

Jonathan Darling

doi:10.1068/d13067p

Abstract

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.

Highlights

““All states are rooted in writing, and the performance of the state in the routines of writing ... [is] fundamental to the naturalisation of the state.” Joyce and Bennett (2010, page 14)
This paper seeks to take forward Gill’s (2010) call for a “critical asylum politics” that unsettles a singular and abstract account of the state, by focusing upon one such “technical device” of government—that of letters sent to asylum seekers by the former UK Border Agency (UKBA)
Latour (2000, page 113) argues that society “has to be composed, made up, constructed, established, maintained, and assembled”, and it is this sense of the continual work involved in maintaining systems of bordering that a concern with the material politics of asylum might bring to the fore

Summary

Introduction

““All states are rooted in writing, and the performance of the state in the routines of writing ... [is] fundamental to the naturalisation of the state.” Joyce and Bennett (2010, page 14). ‘Thing-power’ and the letter In order to explore these material relations, I want to consider the effects of letters in a drop-in centre for asylum seekers in Sheffield.

Results

Conclusion