paperhive conversations_ ines hasselberg - paperhive magazine
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22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg PaperHive Magazine
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Ines Hasselberg
PaperHive Conversations: InesHasselbergTOPICS: Deportation Ines Hasselberg Migration
Enduring Uncertainty by Ines Hasselberg
POSTED BY: MANUEL BLÁUAB MAY 3, 2016
InesHasselberg isaPostdoctoralResearchFellow at theCentre forCriminology(2013-
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Enduring Uncertainty
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PaperHiveConversations:Molly WallaceMolly Wallace is an AssociateProfessor at Queen’sUniversity, Canada. In thepast, she has been publishedin ISLE: InterdisciplinaryStudies in Literature andEnvironment, ContemporaryLiterature, Cultural Critique,and symplokē. Her most
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2016) and project leader for “The Postcolonial Prison:Citizenship, Punishment and Mobility” at the Faculty ofLaw in Oxford University. Hasselberg is also a PhD inAnthropology and a book author. Her most recentbook, Enduring Uncertainty, about the deportationprocess as it is felt and understood by those subjected toit, brings light to a topic of growing importance.
How did you become interested in the migration problem? Is there a story or an inspirational person behind your research
choice?
I’m afraid there isn’t a particular person or story behindmy interest in migration. Once I decided to do a PhD Istarted looking for possible topics of research. I knew thePhD would be long and could be quite lonely during thewriting periods so I wanted to choose a topic that I would
nd interesting but also that I would be passionate about– something that would drive me and encourage me tomove along when things got tough. By chance I cameacross the topic of deportation which I was nding hardto understand – how could people who had lived all theirlives in a given country be forcefully removed to anothercountry that they barely knew? Surely that what was notpossible. But as I researched the subject to put togethermy application to doctoral programmes I realised boththat this was a practice that was expanding at a fast rate,in particular in the global north, and that there wasbarely any academic studies on it.
Is there a speci c fact that sparkled the research resembled in your last book Enduring Uncertainty?
Personal circumstances really. Initially my PhD projectwas designed to look at the experiences of youth deportedfrom the USA to Cape Verde. Yet, as the time for eldworkapproached it turned out to not be possible for me to goto Cape Verde for such a long period of time (on accountof personal reasons). So I had to change my project. Iwanted to keep my focus on deportation policies soI turned the gaze of the research to the experience of
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22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg PaperHive Magazine
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facing deportation – instead of looking at what happensafter you are deported. This allowed to conduct eldworkin the UK and complete my PhD.
What were the biggest surprises during your research for the book?
Well, one surprise was how hard eldwork was. I expectedit to be dif cult, but experiencing it is of coursesomething different. It was hard and frustrating and sad.For one year I spent my days running around London,trying to reach people who were facing deportation fromthe UK. As I spent time with them and their families,deportation was no longer an abstract concept but rathera brutal reality. The stories I was told were sad andemotionally charged, and it took me some time to learnhow to deal with it all. But I guess the biggest surprisewas realising that the larger part of the deportable peoplethat I spoke with was in favour of deportation policies. Ihad just assumed they would be against it, but in fact theyjust contest that these were being applied to them inparticular. You see, most people that I interviewed forthis research had their lives well established in the UK.For them deportation was a legitimate way to deal withforeigners who commit serious offences – and by seriousoffences most were referring to murder, rape,paedophilia, terrorism and so on. They just did not nddeportation legitimate when applied to them inparticular, who had been long in the country and wereconvicted of what they saw as small petty crimes. Theirspouses too had to deal with con icting beliefs that werehard to reconcile – on the one hand they believed that(foreign) people who commit crimes should lose theirright to be in the country but on the other hand they alsobelieved that their children should have the right to growup with their dad. It was all very dif cult.
As the project leader for The Postcolonial Prison: Citizenship,Punishment and Mobility in Oxford University, what are the biggest
problems that you are facing on a daily basis?
Conversations: Ines Hasselberg
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The Postcolonial Prison, is part of larger project led byProf Mary Bosworth and funded by the EuropeanResearch Council. The project is composed of threesubprojects – the Postcolonial Prison being one of these.Another of the subprojects, focused on immigrationdetention and matters of home and belonging is led bymy colleague Dr Sarah Turnbull. So I’m not really on myown. Even though the Postcolonial Prison is being carriedout by me, being part of a research team means that I canalways count on the support and advice of Mary andSarah, and I’ve been learning a lot from them. Havingsaid that, I don’t think there are any particular challengesthat I face daily. The challenges of this project have beenchanging as the research process moves along. Putshortly, the Postcolonial Prison examines what theincreasing number of foreign-national prisoners inEurope may tell us of the role of the prison in carving outnational identity. I started in 2013, and the majorchallenge then was to get access to prison facilities in theUK and Portugal – the two sites of research. Working indifferent jurisdictions meant that I got different levels ofaccess to the led sites and as such ended up with twosets of data that are more different than I rst expected –this is quite a challenge when you’re doing comparativeresearch, but nothing than can’t be addressed. Or so Ihope. I recently wrote a short piece on this issue for theBorder Criminologies blog. Thinking of it actually, Iguess the one challenge that I face on a daily basis isbalancing work and family life and making sure that I domy best at both fronts. In this regard my biggest successin the past three years was learning to enjoy my weekendsguilt-free, or put differently, learning to not work duringthe weekend.
Your case studies are from Portugal, Wales and England. Could these results be extrapolated to the rest of the Western World
Countries?
England & Wales and Portugal appeared as good sites forcomparative research because both have strong coloniallegacies and very similar pro les in their foreign-nationalpopulations in prison, and yet they have different levels
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of immigration enforcement. But the idea of thiscomparative study is not really to extrapolate results toother countries but rather to better understand howexperiences of punishment and belonging intersect withcitizenship. Every country has its own policies withregards to migration, criminal justice andcitizenship/naturalisation, so it is unlikely that resultscan be extrapolated across jurisdictions. What isimportant here is to understand that how these differentpolicies interact within a particular jurisdiction will affecthow punishment and membership to society areexperienced and thought of. What the project is seekingto emphasise is that in today’s world of increasedmobility we must take citizenship into account whenexamining practices of punishment, or the criminaljustice system at large for that matter.
According to your ndings are these societies biased towards certainnationalities?
If so, do you believe there is a possible solution for this problem in the near future, as for example integration programs?
I mentioned before that England & Wales and Portugalhave similar pro les in their foreign-national prisonerpopulations – this is re ected in the fact that in each ofthese two jurisdictions the bulk of the foreign prisonerpopulation originates from their former colonies. So inPortugal you will nd the large part of foreigners inprison are citizens from Cape Verde, Angola, Guine-Bissau, Brazil and so on. In England & Wales this isreplicated to the former colonies of the UK: you nd thatthe foreign-prison population is mostly composed ofcitizens from the Caribbean nations, South East Asia andformer African colonial territories. This is notcoincidence, but rather a re ection of the historicallegacy of colonialism and the resultant histories ofmigration, social exclusion and racial discrimination.
At this point, as I am still analyzing my data, I will refrainfrom commenting on possible solutions.
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Which researchers and/or articles you rely on the most for your work?
Mary Bosworth and Sarah Turnbull are my main soundingboard, and I also rely greatly on their work. Otherresearchers whose work I rely on include Nicholas deGenova, Susan Bibler Coutin, Mathew Gibney, BridgetAnderson, Natalie Peutz, Tania Golash-Boza, NandoSigona, Melanie Grif ths, Marie-Benedicte Dembour,Heike Drotbohm, Emma Kaufman, Miguel Moniz, JulietStumpf, Sarah Willen… and really so many others. This
eld of studies has greatly expanded since I rst startedand new work is coming out frequently. I recently readthe work of Nancy Hiemstra, which was really fascinating.So now I wonder whether I should have named anyone inthe rst place, as I’m sure I left out others whose work hasalso been in uential to me…
PaperHive would like to ask you: If the reader had only 5 minutes, what speci c pages or sections should they de nitely read to gain
insight into your research?
If the reader only has about 5 minutes I would suggestthat s/he reads the Preface to the book (and eventuallythe rst couple of pages from the Introduction). Thepreface to the book is an email sent to me by one of myresearch participants. It is very powerful and describesreally well what is like to live with the uncertainty ofdeportation. Alternatively, they can read this postrecently published by Allegra.Lab where I’ve includedand contextualised that email, and provided a shortinsight to the book’s contents and arguments.
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Manuel BláuabEditor-in-Chief Manuel Bláuab is a
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