The Digitally Dis/Connected Asylum Seeker: On the Affective (Re)Mediation of the UK’s Hostile Environment

Abstract

This thesis tracks how the affective capacities of the UK’s Hostile Environment (what it feels like to live under hostile policies, practices, and systems enrolled within the UK’s asylum application process) get mediated and (re)mediated through everyday smartphone lifeworlds. Drawing upon one year of ethnographic data collection in the North-East of England (including twenty-six semi-structured interviews and three participatory mapping workshops), this work offers novel insights into how forms of smartphone subjectivity are remapping affectual state power at the everyday level within the UK’s asylum system.

As a body of work, I offer two major novel contributions to geographical thought. First, I develop an account of critical posthumanism that highlights the power-laden nature of taken-for-granted forms of smartphone connectivity. Going beyond mainstream imaginaries of the smartphone subject (read: white, male, heteronormative), I ground the ‘digitally-connected asylum seeker’ within longer legacies of colonial violence and harm. In doing so, I draw attention to how the integration of the smartphone into the asylum application process — both from the perspective of state governance and everyday life — continues to (re)produce legacies of racialised Othering, whilst simultaneously making possible opportunities to resist and destabilise Otherness through digitally-mediated forms of affirmative life.

Second, I offer a commentary on the value of tracing ambiguous affectual relations within the asylum experience. Through the lens of everyday smartphone practices, I explore how the digital mediation of the UK’s Hostile Environment simultaneously intensifies and destabilises what hostility feels like in everyday life. Speaking to current debates within human geography on the balance between negative and affirmative relations, I put forth an account of everyday digital life that holds the tension between more commonly represented affectual relations like exhaustion, and less-visible, alternative relations such as hope or care(ing). In doing so, I build upon the contributions of Black feminist scholarship to question the hegemony of negativity within representations of Othered life: opening up a dialogue of how we research and represent forms of life governed through asylum systems.