This chapter offers critical and original insights into the mistreatment of asylum seekers who arrived (or attempted to arrive) by boat after 19 July 2013, peo-ple who the Australian authorities forcibly sent offshore to regional processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island. Importantly, this chapter reveals the lived experience of asylum seekers and refugees exposed and subjected to the “car-ceral-border archipelago” (which encompasses Australia’s immigration deten-tion centres on the mainland and on Christmas Island, Papua New Guinea (PNG) [Manus Island detention centre has closed with remaining refugees held in Port Moresby], Nauru, and the Australian-funded facilities in Indonesia). At the time of writing some asylum seekers and refugees remain in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, some people have been transferred to Australia on medi-cal grounds,1 and others have been resettled in third countries including the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Asylum, refugee, and immigration movements in Australia represent distinct, as well as overlapping, repertoires of collective action on behalf of others who are often silent, or silenced in public debates. Various categories of newcomers have differential rights as noncitizens, residents, or “illegals,” and these differences are also reflected in the emergence and vigor of social movements in defense of the “rightless.” These movements have formed, engaged in forms of protest, advocacy, and collective action, and subsided in various waves in reaction to public policy that seeks to restrict the rights of migrants. In Australia such restrictions have been manifested in forms of border control, in limiting access to courts and judicial review processes, through detention, and through deportation. Often the most vulnerable groups of migrants have been the targets of such measures, and it is these groups that movement actors have been engaged in defending.

We evaluate the complexity of temporary migration schemes in contrast to the longstanding approach to immigration as a key aspect of nation-building in settler societies. Until the early 1990s, predominantly one-way, permanent immigration schemes were preferred in settler societies such as Australia. In an increasingly fluid global context, temporary migrants are more susceptible to forms of abuse and exploitation in a host society, with fewer forms of redress due to their status as non-citizens and non-permanent residents. Taking a specific focus upon Australia, we contextualize the experiences of temporary migrants both prior to and under the conditions of COVID-19. Our key argument is that temporary migration schemes are organised and structured not only to favour states, as well as employers and businesses, but that the stripping back of rights to those who enter these schemes is a deliberative aspect of the state approach.

Today, images, photographs, artwork, film – indeed, all aspects of visual culture – are key forms of communication and interaction. Visual culture powerfully connects humans to convey emotions and meaning across timeand space, beyond the constraints of language.

The sensory world gives complex feedback on the ebbsand flows of daily lives. The chains of connectivity between living entities defy the breaks and the disruptions. New digital technologies, together with the reach ofsocial networks, amplify the role of the visual.

This article examines the global pandemic, COVID-19, through the lens of responses to vulnerable migrants, asking what state responses mean for the future of human rights values and for humanitarian interventions. The responses of the Australian state are developed as a case study of actions and policies directed at refugees and temporary migrant workers through the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical framing of the article draws on racial capitalism to argue that the developments manifest during the crisis times of COVID-19 are in large part a continuity of the exclusionary politics of bordering practices at the heart of neoliberal capitalism. The article proposes that a rethinking of foundational theoretical and methodological approaches in the social sciences are needed to reflect contemporary changes in justice claims, claims that increasingly recognize the multi-species nature of existential threats to all life.

This article focuses on borders as both physical and metaphysical boundaries-ones that are manifest in systems of meaning, punishment and surveillance. These systems operate on the human body as discipline and punishment in multiple ways. Drawing on a critical framework of the racialized carceral state, this article explores artistic and literary interventions by refugees against the architecture of externalized borders imposed by the Australian state. The works of the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani and his collaborators are explored as a case study. Boochani is subject to Australias offshore detention regime, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. This article asks what new concepts are needed to disrupt the hierarchy of humans that is a by-product of the national border and its systems of control, criminalization and exclusion.

This article explores the status of temporariness in international migration. The focus is on the impact of temporary status on migrants actions, behavior, and emotional responses to the daily circumstances in negotiating everyday life. Ambivalence is evaluated as an explanatory category that allows particular insight into strategies of resistance used by temporary migrants as they navigate a host society besides maintaining connections with home. Original data obtained from in-depth interviews with Indonesian migrant workers and students undertaking temporary migration projects in Australia is discussed. The case study explored in this article identifies some of the core problems temporary migrants face as encapsulated by a deficit of rights and protections that, at the same time, are expected by members of liberal states. Temporary status turns migrants into nomadic global laborers. The article argues that actions and responses that appear to be ambivalent are far from irrational, hasty, or disloyal. Rather, migrants decision-making in response to the uncertain and shifting economic and sociocultural environments that they enter often comprises subtle calibrations and switching actions, observable as ambivalence, in adjusting to the unanticipated demands of a new society.

During 2015 the European Union experienced what many media commentators and European politicians called a crisis with close to one million migrants, mostly asylum seekers, arriving through the southern islands and port cities of Italy and Greece. The majority of the migrants were Syrians who had fled the civil war and had come to Europe after spending considerable time in the overcrowded refugee camps that were running short of basic supplies such as food and water. The “crisis” from the perspective of the dominant European debate is a crisis of the arrival of these irregular migrants in such large numbers. Yet at its heart this is a crisis of political will. Though there are many voices in the European debates, a strong thread of continuity voiced early by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and later by others has been one of shared responsibility and finding a just solution rather than closing borders.

This article considers the Australian response to new global migration flows with a focus on irregular migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The effects of temporary status and invisibility on lived experience and on social and legal norms are explored, with the off-shore processing of asylum seekers at the extreme end of state policies of externalising borders and irregular migrants. The article problematises the official categorisation of migrants into administrative and legal domains and the consequent construction of a normative hierarchy of good and bad migrants. In the Australian context, political narratives of deserving and undeserving migrants and of asylum seekers as disturbing the ordered migration system are used to justify the need for the protection and security of the nation. The article argues that articulations of a just society and the spread of human rights are weakened through such official narratives of fear and rejection that dehumanise irregular migrants such as asylum seekers, and highlights the work of civil society organisations in attempting democratic accountability.

Affect is explored in relation to the governance of irregular migrants and asylum seekers that turn such vulnerable individuals into a feared category. How are emotions as practices developed, fostered and enacted? The examples developed in the article focus on illegal maritime arrivals (asylum seekers arriving by boat) and the emotionally charged response to them in Australia. The article argues that the state, far from embodying a detached and neutral arbiter utilising various steering mechanisms of care and due process, instead governs through fear and anxiety generated in relation to outsiders. The state draws on, and indeed creates, dispositions and feelings, generating a distinct politics of affect. The motif of the lifeboat is an example of a diversion from the anxieties and fears in everyday life; a metaphor for scarcity and a battle for survival. The asylum seeker as illegal maritime arrival (boat person) is the exemplar of such a lifeboat politics in the Australian case. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.