Around, despite, and without reference to domination: crafting oppositional human geographies in migrant detention

Migrant detention is shaped by, and productive of, spatialities and temporalities that are both exclusionary and dehumanising. People who are detained must navigate these conditions. They form relationships of mutual aid, pray, make efforts to control their space and time, study and critique the circumstances they are in, work towards their own self-improvement, sign for voluntary departure in order to be free, fight for their cases, and take individual and collective action to improve the conditions they are living in. In this chapter, I draw on interviews I conducted with people who had been detained at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in the US Pacific Northwest, and their family members. I also include in my data set texts about detention at the NWDC written by people who were detained there, including letters, poems, testimonials, and hunger strike demands, some of which were shared with me for this research and others of which were publicly circulated. I analyse this data set for the practices of people who are detained in relation to how they navigate the spatialities and temporalities of detention. In doing so, I mobilize Saidiya Hartman (1997)’s conceptualisation of practice - the ways that people who live under conditions of oppression and severe constraint navigate these conditions in the everyday, in ways that do and do not encompass resistance or politics. The concept of practice allows an analysis of the ways that people navigate exclusion and dehumanisation without reifiying or negating “the political”, or reinforcing narratives of pain and suffering. I also mobilise Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014)’s conceptualisation of researching desire rather than researching pain narratives, and positioning the texts and interviews that I conducted as intellectual productions and subjugated knowledges. Through my analysis, I schematise and theorise the practices of people in detention at NWDC as escape (desiring freedom), critique (desiring justice), self-improvement (desiring life and time), and protest (desiring power). I find that these forms of practice cannot all be analysed under the rubric of resistance, though each practice reflects a desire for different geographies or space-times. This approach offers us a window into the coexistence of human agency and structures of power and domination.