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Book Launch:
Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive
Institute of Contemporary Arts
ICA Bookstore, Friday 5 November 2021, 5:30pm
All welcome, admission free


This book draws on ten years of research by Mary Bosworth inside Britain’s immigration removal centres. Material includes pictures gathered directly from the people who were detained, operational and administrative documents provided by institutions, and original artworks made by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. Working collaboratively and across their disciplines, the authors seek to illuminate everyday life within these hidden institutions.

While the pandemic has, at least temporarily, reduced the numbers incarcerated in the UK for immigration matters, harsh border control practices there, across Europe, and elsewhere continue to animate and be reinforced by populist right-wing governments. Notwithstanding the damage these institutions cause for individuals and their families, as well as the futility of trying to prevent unauthorised border crossing in a world like ours that is shaped by inequality, governments everywhere remain stubbornly committed to this custodial practice. 

In sharing some of the stories of those locked up, as well as in its creative interpretations of these spaces, this book seeks to challenge their use and legitimacy.

This event includes an introduction by co-authors Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mary Bosworth.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is also appearing at Symposium: Moving Images, Institutional Bodies earlier in the day.
Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford where she also directs Border Criminologies, an international research network that studies the growing intersections between criminal justice and migration control. Mary has been conducting research inside immigration detention centres in the UK since 2009, and has visited numerous detention sites also elsewhere in Europe. She is currently studying the deportation system in the UK.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (she/her) is an Austrian-Australian artist and historian based in Vienna. She is Professor and Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham and is currently leading an Artistic Research project about ‘Museums and Communities in the process of Repatriation from Europe’. She is the co-author of Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (2020) and co-editor of Third Text journal.