IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envirc/v43y2025i1p184-200.html

Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK

Author

Listed:
  • Amanda Schmid-Scott

Abstract

The border, the body, immigration reporting centres, and detention facilities, the violence of border regimes operates across these sites through a continuum, successively steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal. Adopting a feminist framing of violence, which attends to the inherent interconnectedness between different sites and scales of violence, this paper focuses on immigration reporting to examine how its sites and practices enact various forms of violence over migrant bodies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with asylum-seekers in Bristol and Salford, I argue that a host of spatiotemporal practices produce various forms of violence which become intimately inflicted and experienced, and yet which are inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. How reporting sites and processes function reflect the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed on those who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state.

Suggested Citation

  • Amanda Schmid-Scott, 2025. "Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 43(1), pages 184-200, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:1:p:184-200
    DOI: 10.1177/23996544241264964
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544241264964
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/23996544241264964?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kate Coddington & Deirdre Conlon & Lauren L. Martin, 2020. "Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control," Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 110(5), pages 1425-1444, September.
    2. Daniel X.O. Fisher & Andrew Burridge & Nick Gill, 2019. "The political mobilities of reporting: tethering, slickness and asylum control," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(5), pages 632-647, September.
    3. Mark B. Salter, 2013. "To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(1), pages 7-19, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Juan Zhang & Brenda SA Yeoh, 2016. "Harnessing exception: Mobilities, credibility, and the casino," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(6), pages 1064-1081, June.
    2. Henryk Alff, 2020. "Belts and roads every- and nowhere: Conceptualizing infrastructural corridorization in the Indian Ocean," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 38(5), pages 815-819, August.
    3. Weiqiang Lin & Brenda SA Yeoh, 2016. "Moving in relations to Asia: The politics and practices of mobility," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(6), pages 1004-1011, June.
    4. Wai-chi Chee, 2017. "Trapped in the current of mobilities: China-Hong Kong cross-border families," Mobilities, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(2), pages 199-212, March.
    5. Martina Tazzioli, 2023. "Digital expulsions: Refugees’ carcerality and the technological disruptions of asylum," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 41(7), pages 1301-1316, November.
    6. David Beckingham, 2019. "Bureaucracy, case geography and the governance of the inebriate in Scotland (1898–1918)," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 37(8), pages 1434-1451, December.
    7. Lucrezia Canzutti & Claudia Aradau, 2024. "Collecting, assembling, ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 42(7), pages 1242-1259, November.
    8. Jane Freedman & Nina Sahraoui & Elsa Tyszler, 2022. "Asylum, Racism, and the Structural Production of Sexual Violence against Racialised Women in Exile in Paris," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-17, September.
    9. Jensen, Anne, 2013. "Controlling mobility, performing borderwork: cycle mobility in Copenhagen and the multiplication of boundaries," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 220-226.
    10. Estela Schindel, 2022. "Death by ‘nature’: The European border regime and the spatial production of slow violence," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 40(2), pages 428-446, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envirc:v:43:y:2025:i:1:p:184-200. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.