90% seminar in Media and Communication

Detain(ed):Technology and Migrants in Swedish Detention Centres with Miriana Cascone.

This dissertation explores the relationship between technologies and migrants within the detention context. The focus is on the detention system, a measure widely used for migration management by several Western countries, which disrupts mobility and immobilises the migrant trajectory, both physically and geographically, but, as I argue, also digitally. Migrants have often been described as hybrid, ubiquitous, mobile beings due to the revolution brought about by new technologies that make them connected migrants. In Swedish detention centres, on the other hand, access to available media technology is severely restricted and controlled, even in terms of activity, resulting in a regime of a non-total-connection. Migrants are not completely disconnected, the non-connection is seen as a moment of forced interruption and adaptation, not only of the detained person, but also of all the transnational relationships that connection is or was able to initiate and maintain. The question that guides the entire study, then, is: what happens when the connected migrant is no longer connected? Using a Grounded Theory approach and relying on ethnographic interviews with detained migrants and individuals who have been but no longer, this research explores the experience of indefinite detention and the role of technologies, present but also absent, within this experience. Influenced by Goffman's concept of Total Institution, I propose the Waiting Institution framework for detention centres, in which waiting comes to the fore as a fundamental dimension that defines the experience of the everyday life within them and stands in a triangular relationship with power and control. I also introduce three sensitizing concepts: Vulnerability, Temporalities and Spatiality, which find a common ground but also a mutual explanation precisely in the dimension of waiting that is presented through the technologies of detention, as a practice also highlighting creativity and agency, and finally as a relationship with the reality inside and outside detention. Based on media-practice theory, I argue that media practices and technologies in detention emerge as rituals. There is an everydayness that detention interrupts and from which detainees feel excluded, and there is another one that is formed and which, however, is only proper to the centres. Media practices and technologies are seen as those rituals that create a bridge between the two realities and give migrants at least the semblance of a connection and belonging with the outside world.