Criminalising the Vulnerable - the photo exhibition, the book, and the knowledge exchange

This coming together of Beckett academics, community agencies and critical friends arose from Brexit, ‘Stop the Boats’, and an eco-system of far-right hostility in which no suspect communities (foreigners, LGBTQ+, offenders) are safe.

Across the photo-exhibition, female migrants fit into one of three administrative categories: that of asylum seeker (like Wema from Malawi), economic migrants who become trafficked (like Anita from Greece), and ‘virtual nationals’ who had lived longer in Britain than in their birth country (like Linda from Zimbabwe).

Irrespective of classification, all three groups face prosecution and removal under crimmigration laws - which apply a criminal justice logic to manage irregular migration. As Bowling and Westenra note for the merger of administrative immigration law and criminal justice law, “there is now a corresponding criminal offence for almost every breach of immigration rules”.

Intertwining these two routes to removal means the State gets two goes at a deportation. If the strict liability case of arriving without papers is too onerous to prosecute, then irregular migrants can be indefinitely detained inside an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) until their case is resolved.

Since IRCs are closed institutions to all but a few (for example, the charity Music in Detention runs workshops inside), the exhibition’s primary objective was one of public engagement with the British system of asylum administration.

Fifteen former detainees shared their experiences of life inside one, in the hope of a better legal-policy-community reception for future arrivals. Collectively, women’s experiences pinpoint a 2-tier system of justice under crimmigration – one with legal and due process protections for citizens and one without basic Human Rights for non-citizens under ‘deport first, appeal later’ powers.

Within this overriding theme of abnormal justice, several sub themes resonated with colleagues researching other suspect groups leading to a new book. As part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Criminology Perspectives, the chapters counter-challenge State and Criminal Justice discourses towards the vulnerable.

Key amongst counter-narratives is the carceral turn in managing the marginalised; the crucial element of punishment within criminalisation; the affective influences of State institutions and actors on inmate mental health; the neo-liberal drive for profit and privatisation; the inability of demonised groups to access justice or to safely report being a victim of crime. As keenly captured in Kia’s exhibition storyboard: “They [G4S] told me – you can make a report at any time, and we’ll make ours”.

A fuller account of stories featured in the exhibition and guiding the book chapter on crimmigration can be read in this paper published in Social Policy and Society.

At the end of a public engagement project involving Higher Education, the focus is heavy on constitutive knowledge exchange – how to connect what was communicated (often to a like-minded audience) with decision makers at a higher level (often with a rival ideological standpoint).

Across the exhibition-book alliance, constitutive knowledge exchange is created by applying an intersectional sociological (rather than a singularly aesthetic) lens on vulnerabilities and their correlation with borders, criminal justice systems, and State policies of uneven social justice.

As Anne Ring Petersen observes, whenever a hidden, silenced or diminished experience is brought into the mainstream, then conversations with taken-for-granted narratives of race, migration, sexual orientation, and others are activated.

Below are four examples of activistic conversations in knowledge exchange linked to our Rose Bowl exhibition in December 2023:

• Dialogue with Keep our NHS Public over a photographic exhibition on migrant charges.
• Awareness-raising of the Palgrave Macmillan book steered by Dr. Anthony Ó Donnghaile - Drummond in conversation with Baroness Brinton in Parliament in January 2024.
• Conversation with Salford University on a Regional Sanctuary Steering Network building language, learning, and employment capacity with local asylum and refugee communities.
• Leeds Partners and critical friends continue to embed empirical perspectives into School and Church curricula, enhancing efforts at a Sanctuary Award.