Bearing witness at a Home Office reporting centre

Despite the proliferation of interest in resistance within asylum politics in recent years, Home Office reporting centres have not been adequately theorised as sites of resistance, presumably considered lacking in the ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) possible in areas of extremity or more symbolic richness (Graeber 2012). Yet the reporting centre provides a unique space for examining resistance, and in this chapter I explore specifically how volunteers respond to the seemingly mundane, administrative operations of these sites. Appropriating a Rancièrian notion of politics as that which disrupts the usual order of things, I argue that volunteers, who regularly attend to offer support to those reporting, engage in a form of resistance through various ‘dissensual reconfigurations’ (Rancière 2010) which interrupt the ‘going-on-being’ (Bayly 2013) of these operations. Drawing from ethnographic research as a volunteer with Bristol Signing Support (BSS), as well as interviews with volunteers and activists, this chapter attends to resistance by distinguishing dissensus from protest, recognising the limitations of how volunteers may inhabit this highly constrained space. Firstly I explore their role as ‘witness-bearers’, which I argue temporarily disrupts the unidimensional gaze of the Home Office towards people reporting. By introducing their own gaze into this scene, I show how volunteers rupture the one-way mode of visibility, which as well antagonises the non-thinking mode of process operating within the space. Secondly, by routinely occupying the reporting space, volunteers, who mostly consist of retired middle-class women, disrupt their normative privileged spatial boundaries, thus making their bodily presence a form of resistance, through challenging the attempts to monopolise access to and knowledge of reporting practices. Ultimately, by exploring these dissensual reconfigurations as forms of resistance, I attend to the temporality as well as the limitations of resistance in its unexpected, emergent form (Hughes 2019) and beyond its necessity to instigate political transformation.