We are delighted to invite you to a symposium and book launch for Deter, Detain, Dehumanise: the politics of seeking asylum.

A number of contributors will be attending the launch and will participate in a panel discussion on the book's key themes.

Panel participants include Hani Abdile, Barat Ali Batoor, Behrouz Boochani, Linda Briskman, Claire Loughnan, Julie Macken, Bosco Opi, Rachel Sharples and Claudia Tazreiter.
Poet Hani Abdile will perform a live reading of her poem, Trenches of the Unknown.
Award-winning photographer and filmmaker Barat Ali Batoor will screen his photographs documenting his journey seeking asylum.

Post-panel drinks and nibbles will be provided.

We look forward to seeing you all there.

About the book

Under a pretext of humanitarian response to people seeking asylum, nation states are increasingly introducing barriers to prevent entry for those seeking safety and security. Documenting the systemic politicisation of the right to seek asylum in Australia, a process that has been hailed as a model for other parts of the world, Deter, Detain, Dehumanise examines how the right to seek asylum has become a political tool of deterrence, detention, and dehumanisation.

Bringing together leading academics across criminology, geography, law, political science, social work and sociology, this edited collection of essays provides an understanding and critical assessment of Australian government policy as a series of systems, structures and operations that seek to normalise the detention and deterrence of those seeking asylum, explicitly defying Australia’s international human rights obligations. Complemented by shorter, creative writings by refugees with lived experience of detainment at Australia’s behest, chapters pursue an overtly political and innovative conceptual approach to the politicisation of seeking asylum, offering new insights into its structural framings.

Taken together, this body of work examines how Australia has politicised the right to seek asylum, to the detriment of asylum seekers and refugees as well as Australian citizens, and tentatively offers hope on how we might seek to normalise, legitimise and re-humanise the processes.

Contents

Foreword

Behrouz Boochani

Introducing the politics of deterrence, detainment and dehumanisation

Linda Briskman and Rachel Sharples

A desperate search for freedom

Barat Ali Batoor

Chapter 1: ‘Create a problem, provide a solution’: the racialisation and politicisation of seeking asylum

Rachel Sharples and Linda Briskman

Chapter 2: Torturable subjects and psychotic pockets

Julie Macken

Chapter 3: Examining the politicization of asylum through public information campaigns: deterrence messaging for whom?

Kate Coddington

Chapter 4: decolonial critique of Kenya’s encampment and asylum policy

Bosco Opi

Chapter 5: Anonymous Lives: The Counted and Uncounted

Claire Loughnan

Chapter 6: Die trying: Asylum seeker deaths at sea

Michelle Dimasi

Chapter 7: Manus Prison Theory, Art and the Politics of Refugee Representation: Contesting the “Deserving Refugee” Narrative

Anthea Vogl

Chapter 8: People and Places That Matter: Racialised Assemblages in Nauru’s Hyperextractive Asylum Regime

Julia Morris

Chapter 9: An end to refugee protection? The new global carceral archipelagos of exclusion and possibilities for alternative future

Claudia Tazreiter

Trenches of the unknown

Hani Abdile