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Tag: detention

De-racing the Border

After a few weeks silence due to other commitments, I am returning with the eighth blog post in the series to attend to the themes of borders and mobilities. My comments respond to Reece Jones’s book, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move which in sum I consider a good example of a lacuna I have observed at the heart of much critical thinking on the nature of borders – their overwhelming failure to consider the centrality of race. I will use the opportunity offered by the reading of this book to consider why I believe a race critical analysis should be central to work on borders and migration, what the dangers of ignoring race might be for an understanding of current urgencies. A broader question of what a reading which conceives of borders as inherently violent without thinking about the racialised nature of this violence means for our understanding of what the border does is one I leave for later on but which is triggered by the reading of this book to which the theme of violence is key. While my comments today will be relatively brief, I see these questions as being of major importance for my wider project on race and relationality; how can we suture in much of the vital work that is done in what we coul call ‘critical border studies’ into a framework that is attentive to race?

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Divestment protestors occupy Australian Council of Superannuation Investors Conference

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 14.23.07Reposting news of this very important action by Divest from Detention activists:

Text of pamphlet distributed at meeting of Australian Council of Superannuation investors annual conference, Melbourne, 10th May 2016.

This morning, 10th May 2016, the Divest from Detention network has targeted the annual conference of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) in Melbourne:

Mandatory detention cannot be risk managed: close the camps
In August 2015, in the wake of HESTA’s decision to divest from Transfield, it was reported that ACSI was “seeking more information” on the situation in the Manus and Nauru detention camps. Just in case ACSI and its member funds haven’t noticed, people are still being raped, illegally detained, tortured and are still dying on Manus and Nauru, all on the dime of some of Australia’s largest super funds. Compensation for illegal detention on Manus Island is likely to run into the millions if not billions.

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It’s racist, and you know it is…

Following the Irish government’s plans to move asylum seekers from a detention centre at Mosney, a former Butlins style holiday camp, where they have, despite all the odds, made a home, Gavan Titley responds to a racist article by Ian O’Doherty of the Irish Independent. In the Irish Left Review,…

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Alana Lentin