Slow Academia, Understanding, and Critique: Moving Beyond Emotions 

Post by Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford. Mary can be found on Bluesky @mfbosworth@bsky.social. This post is part of a mini thematic series about methodological reflections arising from a Detention and Deportation thematic group workshop. Find all the posts in the series here.

I have recently published the first academic study of staff in the UK’s outsourced immigration detainee escorting system. That book, Supply Chain Justice, draws on four years of mixed method research, much of which was ethnographic in nature. I had hundreds of informal conversations and completed hours of non-participant observation in multiple sites of detention, in custodial vans and during the boarding of deportation flights. I also conducted around fifty structured interviews, and at the end of the project, designed and administered a survey to 170 members of staff.   

It was a difficult project practically, emotionally, and intellectually all of which had methodological effects. First, it took ages to get permission to do – over two years. And even then, the system is so sprawling and with so many different parts that it was very cumbersome for one person to study.  While I had initially designed an 18-month study, 8 months in, when I was finally starting to settle into the research, the country went into lockdown due to Covid. Luckily, I was able to move a lot of it online, but when it was finally safe to restart in-person observations and conversations, I found I had to reestablish ties and relationships. Many people had left, practices had changed, and the project had largely been forgotten. 

From the start, I found the research very upsetting. While I had initially planned to follow deportations from start to finish, I quickly realised I not only did not have the physical stamina, I also could not bear the emotional toll.  It was hard enough to witness people being stopped at the border, particularly in the sites in and around Dover. So, I settled on observing the musters, collections and boardings. 

It was all exhausting. Deportations often begin in the dead of night, or very early in the morning.  The process takes a long time.  Short-term holding facilities and vehicle bases are far from Oxford, and people’s work shifts are very long. I was rarely in a position to be able to stay over, and I don’t like being away from home anyway, so I drove for hours at a time in both directions in a bid to have some relief. While I took notes in each place, my daily summaries were dictated while I drove home. Presumably neither entirely safe, nor as complete as they should have been. 

It was also often rather dull. After COVID, the short-term holding facilities were frequently empty, which left me sitting with people who were bored for hours at a time. The vast majority of deportations were cancelled. 

I had gone into the project expecting to find a certain emotional set of responses from officers. I thought that they would express some ambivalence about their job, as I had documented in the past among staff in Immigration Removal Centres. I also had a set of expectations about myself. I am an experienced researcher and have been going into immigration detention sites since 2009. I thought I would be fine. 

I was wrong.   

It was not that I saw a lot of explicit violence – although there was some. It was far more confusing than that. I found the silence of the people held in the short-term holding facilities unsettling, particularly among the teenage boys at the Kent Intake Unit and the mothers and babies in Manston. I was unnerved by the casual conversations among overseas escorts about the benefits of the various frequent flyer mile programmes they could join. I did not know what to make of the description of the bucolic British countryside by the people employed while transferring detained people from one site of custody to another.   

Having previously studied sites of long-term detention, which look and feel like prison, I was initially thrown by this custodial system which is characterised by speed and forced mobility. Although for those subject to it, short term detention and deportation may feel punitive, immigration detainee escorting is run like a “logistics system”, as a senior staff member put it, in one of our first meetings. At the time, I presumed this claim was a ‘strategy of denial’; business-speak that helped this man overlook the humanity of the people he was earning his salary to move on behalf of the Home Office and his own culpability in their distress. And, no doubt, there was an element of that.  Similar points could be made about the myriad and often ridiculous acronyms and specialised terminology that pepper the industry like ‘SAMS’ to refer to ‘single adult men’, and ‘shushwuffs’ (SSHWF) which are “suicide self-harm warning forms”. Senior staff refer frequently to ‘SLAs’ and ‘KPIs’; everyone is meant to pay attention to ‘risk assessments’. Charter flights are known as ‘bulk movements’. 

Over time, however, I came to realise that these practices and forms of speaking are not (just) affect. They also reflect quite fundamental economic arrangements. Although some officers insisted that “people are not packages” they barely interacted with the people in their custody once they had completed their induction process. And indeed, there was little call or opportunity to do so, in this system which is run according to a strict set of timings, that are constantly recorded and updated for the purpose of contract monitoring and financialisation. Being late for a range of tasks generates a fine, or what is called a ‘service credit’; if it happens too often, those to blame may be sacked. 

As I began to pay attention to such matters, it was hard to avoid the realisation that staff too were affected. Like employees of other logistics companies, they worked long shifts, in poor conditions, with little to no chance of progress or change. Making sense of such matters and moving from them into critique is largely an intellectual and theoretical challenge, but it is also methodological. First and most easily, I think it is important to continue to try to do very long-term projects. Academic research is often criticised for being slow, but things are not always as they seem and more time in the field allows more nuance to be revealed. It took me a long time to really think through the issue of logistics. 

Perhaps more provocatively, I also think there was a lesson here for me about emotions. On the one hand, I am totally burned out, in part because of the casual dehumanisation that I witnessed. But it was upsetting not just because people were detained and deported, but because the whole system felt corrosive for all its members; staff included. 

There is a tendency in academic research to understand emotional responses in research as indicative of preference; in this view it is hard to study officers because politically a researcher is unlikely to agree with them. While Irene Vega has recently characterised this tension in her excellent new book on US border guards as one between sympathy and empathy, I would like to go even further. I’m not convinced that my views of the people I study are relevant. I don’t expect, or need, to like or dislike them. This is not the same as saying I am neutral. I am not. But what I really want to do through empirical research is tryto understand what they are doing and what the state is asking of them.   

In this increasingly polarised world, where so many voices are calling for exclusion and hatred, it is understandable that many of us want to work with people who face the worst excesses of coercion. Yet, we need to be careful not to overlook those who we might feel little or even no affinity towards, since to challenge the system meaningfully, we must also scrutinise its agents — not to exonerate, but to expose the conditions, routines, and pressures that sustain the system they operate.  If we are ever to move beyond the current moment, we will need to do it together.  

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