Video Abstract for 'Immigration Detention and Social Harm' - Dr Michelle Peterie

This interdisciplinary edited collection is the first internationally to comprehensively explore the harms immigration detention imposes beyond the 'detainee'. Bringing together research from North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, it shows how the harms immigration detention imposes ramify beyond singular bodies, moments and locations - reverberating through families and communities and echoing across time.

The book is structured in three parts. Part One: Human Costs examines the harms immigration detention imposes on people who are not personally incarcerated, but whose lives are nonetheless entangled with detention regimes. Part Two: Societal Consequences highlights the corrosive impacts of immigration detention at the societal level, including the role migrant incarceration plays in naturalising and perpetuating inequalities and injustices. Part Three: Ending the Harm interrogates the possibilities of detention reform and detention abolition.

This book will be a key reference text for scholars and students in the social and behavioural sciences who are interested in immigration detention, human rights and/or incarceration.

About the Author

Dr Michelle Peterie is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies and School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Peterie's research investigates the impacts of social policies and practices on individual and collective wellbeing. Taking a person-centred approach - and in close collaboration with research participants and third-sector stakeholders - her work seeks to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, families and communities. Peterie is the author of Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia's Asylum Seeker Prisons (2022), the co-author of Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good? (2022), and the co-editor of Emotions in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2019). She has been invited to give expert evidence to the Australian Senate, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Crown Solicitor, and her research has received national media attention.

Reviews

This riveting, timely collection of essays critically documents and exposes the wholly negative consequences of immigration detention around the world, precisely as detention is increasingly centred in national and international immigration and border enforcement strategies. Using an original lens of 'social' harm, contributors shift public and scholarly attention to how the impacts of detention reverberate far beyond the place and time of detention. Through a variety of rich, well-researched case studies, this book powerfully illustrates that not only does detention fail to achieve policymakers' stated goals, but it also causes long-lasting, painful, unnecessary harms to families, communities, economies, and societies.

Nancy Hiemstra, Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, US

This book delivers a powerful message as it guides the reader through often overlooked dimensions of immigration detention. It demonstrates how the formulation and delivery of this practice harms not only those detained, their family and friends but society more broadly. In the introduction Michelle Peterie establishes the value of social harm as the conceptual frame of analysis. Through this lens the authors collectively destabilise moral and ethical justifications typically used to sustain the practice and expose the limits of political interest. I highly recommend this important work to scholars and students across disciplinary areas such as sociology, politics, criminology, policy making and law, as well as more general readers seeking to better understand this complex topic.

Melissa Bull, Professor Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Book Information
ISBN 9781032441528
Author Michelle Peterie
Format Hardback
Page Count 260
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g