The scene and the unseen: Neglect and death in immigration detention and aged care

Abstract

Institutional confinement is paradoxically characterised by intense surveillance, while those confined are often rendered invisible as persons of value and agency. Our capacity to ‘see’ violence in such sites can also be harder to discern when it is the manifestation of neglect: not so much as mistreatment but untreatment, the failure to act. Drawing on Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Agamben's conceptualisation of the exception and abandonment, I propose that the deaths resulting from the untreated skin wounds of Annunziata Nancy Santoro, in aged care, and those of Hamid Khazaei, in immigration detention, are the effect of their location in what I call ‘zones of neglect’. Whether in places of care or punishment, neglect functions here as a form of power, in which responsibility for suffering paradoxically recedes from view. This analysis contributes to a growing body of research on quasi-carceral sites that sit uneasily along a continuum of care and control.