Dr Anna Pearce (University of St Andrews)
Teams meeting link for livestream
Tuesday Feb 5, 2-3pm, Arts Seminar Room 6
‘Smoke and Mirrors’ – Policy Incoherence as a Portal into the History and Politics of Asylum Accommodation Management in the UK
This presentation examines the Home Office’s recent ‘hotel maximisation’ policy, which aims to significantly increase the number of ‘bedspaces’ across the asylum accommodation estate by utilising MoD barracks sites and enforcing room sharing across the hotels currently being used. Whilst the expansion of hotels and HMOs to accommodate people seeking the asylum is a relatively new phenomenon, placing it within the historical trajectory of asylum accommodation in the UK reveals the carceral and value-extractive tendencies which have always been a feature of this provision. Using the policy’s moments of contradiction, opacity and incoherence as apertures to inquiry, a novel theoretical conception of the ‘asylum seeker’ as a double abstraction of both law and capital is presented. This composite category enables us to reach the heart of the Home Office’s current conundrum, in which policy objectives are arguably now driven by private sector motivations, with significant implications for the independence of the legislature from capital.
