Letters From Inside A U S Detention Center

"After fleeing homophobia and threats to her life in her native El Salvador, 'Carla' was detained for two years inside the Buffalo Federal Detention Center. Her letters provide a powerful and unique account of a queer woman's experience inside America's asylum system. Letters from Inside a US Detention Centre reconstructs Carla's story from the correspondence between Carla and Jane Juffer, a professor at Cornell University, and from excerpts from the legal decisions made while she was being held in immigration detention. Contextualised with explanation and analysis of detention in the United States, the book examines how detention exacerbates the trauma many migrants experience and becomes another site of fear, intimidation, and uncertainty. Carla's narrative is a powerful story, and one that illustrates grievous injustices in the U.S. immigration and asylum system. The book will be of immense value to immigration activists and scholars alike, especially in feminist studies, queer studies, and those studying the intersections of prisons and detention centres"--

After fleeing homophobia and threats to her life in her native El Salvador, ‘Carla’ was detained for two years inside the Buffalo Federal Detention Center. Her letters provide a powerful and unique account of a queer woman’s experience inside America’s asylum system. Letters from Inside a U.S. Detention Center reconstructs Carla’s story from the correspondence between Carla and Jane Juffer, a professor at Cornell University, and from excerpts from the legal decisions made while she was being held in immigration detention. Contextualised with explanation and analysis of detention in the United States, the book examines how detention exacerbates the trauma many migrants experience and becomes another site of fear, intimidation, and uncertainty. Carla’s narrative is a powerful story, and one that illustrates grievous injustices in the U.S. immigration and asylum system. The book will be of immense value to immigration activists and scholars alike, especially in feminist studies, queer studies, and those studying the intersections of prisons and detention centres.

This book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians—politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens.Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens.When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.

This book builds a compelling picture of injustices inside immigration detention centers, within the context of the rise of the use of immigration detention in the Global North. The author presents the rarely heard voices of refugees, bringing their perspectives to light and personalising and humanising a global political issue. Based on in-depth interviews with formerly detained refugees who were involved in a wide range of protests, such as sit-ins and non-compliance, hunger strikes, lip sewing, escapes and riots, Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention presents a comprehensive insight into immigration detention and protest. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, the book challenges contemporary human rights discourses which institutionalise power and will be a must-read for scholars, advocates and policymakers engaged in debates about immigration detention and forced migration.

Michelle Peterie’s revealing research offers a fresh angle on the human costs of immigration detention. Drawing on over 70 interviews with regular visitors to Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, Peterie paints a unique and vivid picture of these carceral spaces. The book contrasts the care and friendship exchanged between detainees and visitors with the isolation and despair that is generated and weaponised through institutional life. It shows how visitors become targets of institutional control, and theorises the harm detention imposes beyond the detainee. As the first research in this area, this book bears important witness to Australia’s onshore immigration detention system, and offers internationally relevant insights on immigration, deterrence and the politics of solidarity.

Behrouz Boochani, author, filmmaker and journalist wrote his profound and powerful poetic political manifesto A Letter From Manus Island after four years incarceration as a stateless refugee on Manus in Australian-run camps. His letter, a humanitarian message, translated by Omid Tofighian, is published with a preface by Ruth Skilbeck.

This book focuses on the resistance practices digitally enacted by a group of refugees in the context of the Australian detention policy. Drawing on critical-, multimodal- and ethnographic-discursive analytical research, the author brings to the fore the digitally mediated lived experiences of detained refugees as articulated from Australia-run offshore and onshore detention facilities. The book unveils how refugees’ self-representation and counter-discursive practices on social media aim to dismantle the dehumanizing, exclusionary, and obliterating anti-refugee rhetoric that pervades political and media landscapes in contemporary Australia. It will be of interest to academics and students in fields including Digital Migration Studies, Refugee Studies, Digital Media Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies, including Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, and Discourse Ethnography.