We are pleased to announce that Julia Morris (University of North Carolina Wilmington) will present Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru at the first ACBS network seminar for 2023 on Wednesday 22nd of February at 6pm AEDT on zoom. Linda Briskman (Western Sydney University) will provide brief commentary before an open discussion.

Zoom details will be made available closer to the date. Please register if you wish to attend as spaces are limited.

Bio:

Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where she was also a research student at the University’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Previously, she was also a Post-doctoral Fellow at The New School’s Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She is a political anthropologist and migration studies scholar whose research focuses on migration and environmental governance in the Pacific. Her work examines the postcolonial overlaps of resource extractive sectors centred on migrants and commodities, extending to current projects on conservation strategies and multispecies (im)mobilities in Christmas Island and Guatemala.

Book Description:

Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru provides an extraordinary glimpse into the remote and difficult-to-access island of Nauru, exploring the realities of Nauru's offshore asylum arrangement and its impact on islanders, workforces, and migrant populations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Nauru, Australia, and Geneva, as well as a deep dive into the British Phosphate Commission archives, Julia Morris charts the island's colonial connection to phosphate through to a new industrial sector in asylum. She explores how this extractive industry is peopled by an ever-shifting cast of refugee lawyers, social workers, clinicians, policy makers, and academics globally and how the very structures of Nauru's colonial phosphate industry and the legacy of the "phosphateer" era made it easy for a new human extractive sector to take root on the island. By detailing the making of and social life of Nauru's asylum system, Morris shows the institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the governance of migration around the world. As similar practices of offshoring and outsourcing asylum have become popular worldwide, they are enabled by the mobile labor and expertise of transnational refugee industry workers who carry out the necessary daily operations. Morris illuminates how refugee rights activism and #RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of suffering.

Julia Morris - Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru