Abstract

This talk is part of the Infrastructural Geographies series.

Summary:

Recent years have witnessed the outsourcing of immigration and border controls to economically struggling states. Infrastructural projects around controlling migration are transforming localities in the Global South: from shifting legal and political economic systems to altering socialities between migrant and local populations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, this talk considers how past and present infrastructural forms give shape to the ways that (in)justices are created through the concept of the ‘colonial afterlives of infrastructure.’ Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, was almost entirely economically dependent on the phosphate industry in the twentieth century. After the wealth it derived from phosphate extraction was depleted in the 1990s, the sovereign state resurged on the back of the asylum industry by importing Australia’s maritime asylum seeking populations. In this talk, I examine the material life of infrastructure around managing migration in Nauru’s 21 km2 locality, including the toxic interrelationships between phosphate and asylum processing, the industries’ built environments, and the people who live and work in them. I explore how Nauru’s refugee project has reconfigured colonial infrastructural forms, practices of dependency, and socio-legal affiliations as the country is refashioned as a company town in line with new forms of human production.

Dr Julia Caroline Morris is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a doctoral degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on forced migration, borders, and the environment, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Nauru, Australia, Geneva, and Fiji to research projects in Guatemala, Jordan, and Lebanon. Her work looks at the political economy of migration, including the forms of financial and geopolitical value that revolve around the commodification of human mobility. She has published widely including in Political Geography, Journal of Refugee Studies, Forced Migration Review, Global Networks, The Extractive Industries and Society, and with Routledge publication house on immigration and border control and global knowledge networks.