Jacobsen, Malene H. ‘The Everyday Spaces of Humanitarian Migrants in Denmark.’ (2013) [PDF]

Jacobsen, Malene H. The Everyday Spaces of Humanitarian Migrants in Denmark. MA Thesis. University of Kentucky.

Through an analysis of the Danish Immigration Law and asylum system, this research illustrates how the Danish state through state practices and policies permeates and produces the everyday space of humanitarian migrants. Furthermore, it examines how humanitarian migrants experience their everyday life in the Danish asylum system. An examination of state practices in conjunction with humanitarian migrants’ narratives of space and everyday practices, offers an opportunity to explore what kind of politics and political subjectivities that can emerge in the space of humanitarian migrants. This research contribute to our understanding of first, how the securitization of migration has direct impact on the everyday life of humanitarian migrants, second, second, how the state through practices and space governs and de-politicizes humanitarian migrants, and third, humanitarian migrants are able to act politically. Furthermore, this research problematizes the categorization of humanitarian migrants as “asylum seeker” in order to illustrate how the group of humanitarian migrants is a very diverse group of people from different places with various skills and education-, social-, and economic backgrounds. Even though “asylum seekers” are often portrayed as a homogenous group of vulnerable people we cannot assume that these people understand themselves as vulnerable docile “asylum seekers”.

PDF: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=geography_etds.

Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin. ‘The “Imaginary World” of Nationalistic Ethics: Feasibility Constraints on Nordic Deportation Corridors Targeting Unaccompanied Afghan Minors’. (2018) [PDF]

Lemberg-Pedersen, Martin. ‘The “Imaginary World” of Nationalistic Ethics: Feasibility Constraints on Nordic Deportation Corridors Targeting Unaccompanied Afghan Minors’. Etikk i Praksis – Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics, no. 2, Nov. 2018, pp. 47–68.

This article examines Swedish, Danish and Norwegian governments’ participation in the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors (ERPUM) project and its failed attempts to deport unaccompanied minors (UAMs) to Afghanistan. It argues that ERPUM is an interesting and urgent case of a “deportation corridor” and suggests that this framework can benefit from analysis through normative and applied ethics and in particular discussions of feasibility constraints. It therefore identifies and critically assesses two nationalistic arguments for deportation common in Nordic politics, based on appeals to credibility and humanitarianism. Considering the growth of nationalistic immigration policies in Nordic states, the article turns the usual discussion of feasibility on its head by showing that not only cosmopolitan, but also nationalistic ethics must face up to charges of lacking realism. More specifically, it argues that the case of ERPUM illustrates how nationalistic deportation ethics may rely on inconsistent normative and erroneous empirical assumptions, which can be criticized for their arbitrariness, ideological grounding and lack of feasibility.

doi:10.5324/eip.v12i2.2425.

PDF: https://www.ntnu.no/ojs/index.php/etikk_i_praksis/article/download/2425/2861

Jane Jin Kaisen, ed. Loving Belinda, (2015) [PDF]

Jane Jin Kaisen, ed. Loving Belinda, Forlaget * [asterisk], 2015.

The Loving Belinda project began in 2006 with the video Adopting Belinda in which Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, a supposedly Asian-American couple in Minnesota, are being interviewed by a Danish TV host for a series on Danish heritage because they have just adopted Belinda, a white girl from Denmark. Everything appears ordinary with the exception that the racial and cultural dynamics are reversed.

The Loving Belinda Project employs the mockumentary genre, appropriating documentary features to destabilize reality with subversive effect. By staging and reversing the racial “order” within transnational adoption, the works expose some of the uneven economic, racial, and cultural relations of power that are embedded within the practice but that tend to remain unspoken.

The videos Revisiting the Andersons and Loving Belinda as well as the photograph The Andersons from 2015,portray how the family is coping now whenBelinda is nine years old in the midst of changing discourses around transnational adoption.

In the Loving Belinda publication, the fictional universe is contextualized by conversations between the individuals involved in the project, whom in reality are all engaged in critical discourse around transnational adoption, anti-racism and whiteness in Scandinavia. 

Contents:

LOVING BELINDA

Adopting Belinda

Revisiting the Andersons

Loving Belinda

The Andersons

CONVERSATIONS

Tobias Hübinette & Jane Jin Kaisen: Transnational Adoption in the Context of Colonial Repression, Race Relations, and the Right-wing Turn in Scandinavia,

Morten Goll & Jane Jin Kaisen: Reflections on Art, Asylum Politics, Racism, and Transnational Adoption

Lene Myong & Jane Jin Kaisen: The Emergence of Adoption Critiques among Transnational Adoptees in Denmark

ESSAYS / PRESENTATIONS

Marianne Ping Huang: Artistic Research as Critique in Jane Jin Kaisen’s Loving Belinda

Louise Wolthers: Framing the Migrant Body

Tone Olaf Nielsen: Curating Anti-Racist, Pro-Migration & Decolonial Projects

http://janejinkaisen.com/loving-belinda-200615

PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5539922fe4b03e1f32a65bc3/t/557bf05ee4b00283cf1e1590/1434185822742/Loving+Belinda+publication.pdf

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark. (2018) [PDF]

Suárez-Krabbe, Julia, Annika Lindberg, and José Arce-Bayona. Stop Killing Us Slowly: A Research Report on the Motivation Enhancement Measures and the Criminalisation of Rejected Asylum Seekers in Denmark. The Freedom of Movements Research Collective, 2018,

Executive summary:

According to the Danish Minister of Immigration and Integration, the Danish deportation centres Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård are set up to ‘make life intolerable’3 for those rejected asylum-seekers who cannot immediately be detained or deported, thereby pressuring them into leaving Denmark ‘voluntarily’. As part of the motivation enhancement measures introduced into the Danish Aliens Act in 1997 the deportation centres confine asylum seekers in geographically isolated ‘open’ institutions with low living standards and minimum welfare provisions. However, these measures have not fulfilled their official function. Instead of making more people return ‘voluntarily’, they have pushed rejected asylum seekers into illegality, while others remain stuck and de facto confined in deportation centres for a potentially indefinite time period. This report gives an overview of the setup of the deportation centres and analyses how the discrepancy be-tween the intended and real effects may be interpreted. It asks: what are the functions of deporta-tion centres based on their real, rather than politically declared effects? Addressing this question, the report finds the following:

• The deportation centres in particular and the motivation enhancement measures in general, do not fulfil their declared function of increasing ‘voluntary’ returns, nor do they address the issue of migrants who are legally stranded for lengthy periods of time with very circumscribed rights.

• The legal frameworks regulating detention or prisons in Denmark (i.e. time limits, ac-cess to legal advice, rights guarantees) do not apply to deportation centres. Deporta-tion centres can therefore be compared to indefinite detention

.• The deportation centres result in the dras-tic deterioration of the mental and physical health of the men, women, and children ac-commodated there

• The political framework, the juridical setup and the daily rules and practices in depor-tation centres contribute to the criminalisa-tion of migrants and refugees

.• By running these practices in a legal grey zone, the Danish government circumvents – and overtly breaches – human rights reg-ulations at the same time locking residents in a situation with very limited possibilities to contest these conditions and claim their human rights.

• While failing to achieve their own stated goals, the motivation enhancement meas-ures and the deportation centres do achieve making peoples’ lives intolerable: they break people’s spirits and minds and force them to live a life in illegality, outside of the justice- and rights system.~

PDF: http://refugees.dk/media/1757/stop-killing-us_uk.pdf.

Hercowitz-Amir, Adi, and Rebeca Raijman. ‘Restrictive Borders and Rights: Attitudes of the Danish Public to Asylum Seekers’. (2019)

Hercowitz-Amir, Adi, and Rebeca Raijman. ‘Restrictive Borders and Rights: Attitudes of the Danish Public to Asylum Seekers’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, May 2019, pp. 1–20.

Social mechanisms explaining Danes’ attitudes to asylum seekers were analysed on two main dimensions: border control and rights allocation, in a national survey of 500 adult respondents in September 2013. Data show that the respondents supported exclusionary practices against asylum seekers much more than exclusion from rights. Three main mechanisms were simultaneously at play in both exclusionary dimensions: perceptions of threat, social distance (prejudice), and perceiving asylum seekers as not “genuine refugees”. Identifying asylum seekers’ as a security and socio-economic threat, as persons not in “real” fear of persecution, together with prejudicial attitudes to them had a boosting effect on excluding asylum seekers from the Danish collective in terms of entry and rights. Findings are discussed in light of existing theories on exclusionary attitudes to asylum seekers.

doi:10.1080/01419870.2019.1606435.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1606435.

Drud-Jensen, Mads Ted, and Sune Prahl Knudsen. ‘Grænsekontrol – Når Ikke-Heteroseksuelle Søger Asyl i Danmark’. (2008)

Drud-Jensen, Mads Ted, and Sune Prahl Knudsen. ‘Grænsekontrol – Når Ikke-Heteroseksuelle Søger Asyl i Danmark’. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, no. 4, 4, Dec. 2008.

The question of sexuality has not received much attention in migration studies, and (non-hetero)sexuality in relation to asylum has not previously been addressed in a Danish academic context. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s notions of power and governmentality as well as postcolonial theory and its focus on othering and culturalization/racialization, this article explores processes of subjectification of asylumseekers and processes of objectification and regulation of non-heterosexuality through the technologies of what is analytically constructed and signified as the migration apparatus. These processes (re)produce dominant notions of sexuality and culture/ race.

doi:10.7146/kkf.v0i4.27945.

https://tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/view/27945.

Arce, José, and Julia Suárez-Krabbe. ‘Racism, Global Apartheid and Disobedient Mobilities: The Politics of Detention and Deportation in Europe and Denmark’ (2018) [PDF]

Arce, José, and Julia Suárez-Krabbe. ‘Racism, Global Apartheid and Disobedient Mobilities: The Politics of Detention and Deportation in Europe and Denmark’. Kult, vol. 15, 2018.

PDF: http://postkolonial.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/11_Julia-og-Jose_We-are-here-because-you-were-there_final.pdf. http://postkolonial.dk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/11_Julia-og-Jose_We-are-here-because-you-were-there_final.pdf.