SPS
Date: Wednesday 30 April 2025
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Venue: Online
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Cristina Fernández-Bessa, University of A Coruña.

Abstract: 

In recent years, immigration detention has drawn increasing attention from scholars of punishment and society, who highlight its role in expanding the penal landscape and reshaping penality (Bosworth et al., 2018). Border criminology has established immigration detention as a key site of coercive power, yet many aspects remain underexplored. Unlike prisons, detention is highly variable, lacking a stable definition due to its contextual and mutable nature. Core questions remain open: What is its purpose? Where, how long, and under what conditions does it occur? Who manages it, and who is detained?


This presentation addresses these questions through a case study of recent shifts in the migration detention landscape in Southern Europe. It reveals a declining centrality of detention compared to other enforcement practices, such as deportations without prior detention and the use of hotspot facilities. These approaches reflect a broader transformation: contemporary containment practices are increasingly flexible and dispersed, involving diverse actors, infrastructures, and objectives. They respond to changing patterns of international mobility, particularly the rise in asylum seekers.

This analysis suggests the emergence of a fragmented and adaptive archipelago of containment that must be studied within its specific socio-political context.

Bio:

Cristina Fernández-Bessa is Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow and lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of A Coruña. Her main research areas include migration control, border criminology and the governance of insecurity. She is co-chair of the Criminology of Mobility (Immigration, Crime and Citizenship) working group of the European Society of Criminology. She has recently published the edited collection Border Criminologies From The Periphery: Cross-national Conversations on Bordered Penality (Routledge, 2025) with Brandariz, Fabini & Ferraris and the Punishment & Society special issue “The changing landscapes of immigration detention” (2024) with Ana Ballesteros.


This online workshop is part of the Social Penalities Across Boundaries series which is organised by Professor Richard Sparks, the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research/University of Edinburgh, and Professor Máximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Argentina (UNL).

To find out more about us and our work visit www.sccjr.ac.uk

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