Deirdre Conlon
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About Deirdre
Conlon’s research investigates the ways immigration controls, including detention, supervision, and border control sites are proliferating as they are increasingly monetized and financialized. Overarching themes in Conlon’s writings include: intersections between law, place, and migrant exclusion; the valuation of migrant precarity; and interrogation of immigration control networks and supply chains.
Contributions
In the News
Publications
Scrutinizes economic gain as the driving force behind the United States’ massive detention system. Draws on a decade of research to investigate the huge range of companies and local governments that benefit financially and become dependent on locking up more and more
migrants. Details how, in this process, migrants are dehumanized, detention becomes accepted, and society’s moral compass is greatly impacted.
Examines the UK Conservative government’s immigration laws and policies with a focus on the UK-Rwanda Agreement, juxtaposed border controls between the UK and France, and reclassification of detention facilities. Scrutinizes the expanding array of measures and sites utilized in UK immigration enforcement.
Examines the use of holding facilities—temporary, quasi-detention sites used during document checks and status verification for people en route from France to the UK. Highlights issues with jurisdiction, procedures, and accountability and calls for transparency and effective monitoring.
Delves into the relationship between immigration detention, local government, and detention contracts and interrogates the fiscal ties and financial dependencies that detention generates with a focus on three county governments in the state of New Jersey.
Draws on research in the UK and Ireland to investigate some of the paradoxes of liberal democracies and citizenship practices therein through the lens of immigrant detention and asylum seekers' encounters with immigration administration procedures, rules, and regulations.
Examines contributions to detention by geographers who argue that detention is a form of spatial control. Discusses themes including im/mobilities, scaled analyses, and bordering with empirical examples and attention to their usefulness in critical engagement and activism.
Draws on research from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for detention facilities in the New York/New Jersey area, and posits that tracing the political and economic geography of money inside detention facilities is important for understanding the expansion of detention expansion as well as its consequences.
Identifies 'circuits' and 'circuitry' as valuable conceptual and analytical frameworks for examining prisons, immigrant detention, and related spaces of confinement. Sets out an agenda for critical geographies of carceral spaces.
Provides crucial new insights into immigration detention recounting at close range how detention's effects ricochet from personal and everyday experiences to broader political-economic, social and cultural spheres. Draws on original research in the United States, Australia, Europe, and beyond to scrutinize the increasingly tangled relations associated with detention operation and migration management.
Draws on a study of immigration detention in Essex County, New Jersey, with a focus on the contractual arrangements delineating detention between public and private entities and actors. Posits processes of bureaucratization as central to the growth in immigration detention.