Ines Hasselberg is interviewed about her research on deportation and her book "Enduring Uncertainty". She became interested in migration issues during her PhD research and was surprised by how difficult her fieldwork was. Her research found that many deportable individuals supported deportation policies in general but disagreed with their personal cases. Her comparative case studies of Portugal, Wales and England aimed to understand how citizenship intersects with punishment across different immigration policies.

1. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg ­ PaperHive Magazine
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Ines Hasselberg
PaperHive Conversations: Ines
Hasselberg
TOPICS: Deportation Ines Hasselberg Migration
Enduring Uncertainty by Ines Hasselberg
POSTED BY: MANUEL BLÁUAB MAY 3, 2016
Ines
Hasselberg is
a
Postdoctoral
Research
Fellow at the
Centre for
Criminology
(2013-
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Enduring Uncertainty
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Molly Wallace is an Associate
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University, Canada. In the
past, she has been published
in ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and
Environment, Contemporary
Literature, Cultural Critique,
and symplokē. Her most
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2. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg ­ PaperHive Magazine
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2016) and project leader for “The Postcolonial Prison:
Citizenship, Punishment and Mobility” at the Faculty of
Law in Oxford University. Hasselberg is also a PhD in
Anthropology and a book author. Her most recent
book, Enduring Uncertainty, about the deportation
process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to
it, brings light to a topic of growing importance.
How did you become interested in the migration problem?
Is there a story or an inspirational person behind your research
choice?
I’m afraid there isn’t a particular person or story behind
my interest in migration. Once I decided to do a PhD I
started looking for possible topics of research. I knew the
PhD would be long and could be quite lonely during the
writing periods so I wanted to choose a topic that I would
nd interesting but also that I would be passionate about
– something that would drive me and encourage me to
move along when things got tough. By chance I came
across the topic of deportation which I was nding hard
to understand – how could people who had lived all their
lives in a given country be forcefully removed to another
country that they barely knew? Surely that what was not
possible. But as I researched the subject to put together
my application to doctoral programmes I realised both
that this was a practice that was expanding at a fast rate,
in particular in the global north, and that there was
barely any academic studies on it.
Is there a speci c fact that sparkled the research
resembled in your last book Enduring Uncertainty?
Personal circumstances really. Initially my PhD project
was designed to look at the experiences of youth deported
from the USA to Cape Verde. Yet, as the time for eldwork
approached it turned out to not be possible for me to go
to Cape Verde for such a long period of time (on account
of personal reasons). So I had to change my project. I
wanted to keep my focus on deportation policies so
I turned the gaze of the research to the experience of
recent work, Risk Criticism,…
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3. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg ­ PaperHive Magazine
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facing deportation – instead of looking at what happens
after you are deported. This allowed to conduct eldwork
in the UK and complete my PhD.
What were the biggest surprises during
your research for the book?
Well, one surprise was how hard eldwork was. I expected
it to be dif cult, but experiencing it is of course
something different. It was hard and frustrating and sad.
For one year I spent my days running around London,
trying to reach people who were facing deportation from
the UK. As I spent time with them and their families,
deportation was no longer an abstract concept but rather
a brutal reality. The stories I was told were sad and
emotionally charged, and it took me some time to learn
how to deal with it all. But I guess the biggest surprise
was realising that the larger part of the deportable people
that I spoke with was in favour of deportation policies. I
had just assumed they would be against it, but in fact they
just contest that these were being applied to them in
particular. You see, most people that I interviewed for
this research had their lives well established in the UK.
For them deportation was a legitimate way to deal with
foreigners who commit serious offences – and by serious
offences most were referring to murder, rape,
paedophilia, terrorism and so on. They just did not nd
deportation legitimate when applied to them in
particular, who had been long in the country and were
convicted of what they saw as small petty crimes. Their
spouses too had to deal with con icting beliefs that were
hard to reconcile – on the one hand they believed that
(foreign) people who commit crimes should lose their
right to be in the country but on the other hand they also
believed that their children should have the right to grow
up with their dad. It was all very dif cult.
As the project leader for The Postcolonial Prison: Citizenship,
Punishment and Mobility in Oxford University, what are the biggest
problems that you are facing on a daily basis?
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The Postcolonial Prison, is part of larger project led by
Prof Mary Bosworth and funded by the European
Research Council. The project is composed of three
subprojects – the Postcolonial Prison being one of these.
Another of the subprojects, focused on immigration
detention and matters of home and belonging is led by
my colleague Dr Sarah Turnbull. So I’m not really on my
own. Even though the Postcolonial Prison is being carried
out by me, being part of a research team means that I can
always count on the support and advice of Mary and
Sarah, and I’ve been learning a lot from them. Having
said that, I don’t think there are any particular challenges
that I face daily. The challenges of this project have been
changing as the research process moves along. Put
shortly, the Postcolonial Prison examines what the
increasing number of foreign-national prisoners in
Europe may tell us of the role of the prison in carving out
national identity. I started in 2013, and the major
challenge then was to get access to prison facilities in the
UK and Portugal – the two sites of research. Working in
different jurisdictions meant that I got different levels of
access to the led sites and as such ended up with two
sets of data that are more different than I rst expected –
this is quite a challenge when you’re doing comparative
research, but nothing than can’t be addressed. Or so I
hope. I recently wrote a short piece on this issue for the
Border Criminologies blog. Thinking of it actually, I
guess the one challenge that I face on a daily basis is
balancing work and family life and making sure that I do
my best at both fronts. In this regard my biggest success
in the past three years was learning to enjoy my weekends
guilt-free, or put differently, learning to not work during
the weekend.
Your case studies are from Portugal, Wales and England.
Could these results be extrapolated to the rest of the Western World
Countries?
England & Wales and Portugal appeared as good sites for
comparative research because both have strong colonial
legacies and very similar pro les in their foreign-national
populations in prison, and yet they have different levels
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5. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg ­ PaperHive Magazine
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of immigration enforcement. But the idea of this
comparative study is not really to extrapolate results to
other countries but rather to better understand how
experiences of punishment and belonging intersect with
citizenship. Every country has its own policies with
regards to migration, criminal justice and
citizenship/naturalisation, so it is unlikely that results
can be extrapolated across jurisdictions. What is
important here is to understand that how these different
policies interact within a particular jurisdiction will affect
how punishment and membership to society are
experienced and thought of. What the project is seeking
to emphasise is that in today’s world of increased
mobility we must take citizenship into account when
examining practices of punishment, or the criminal
justice system at large for that matter.
According to your ndings are these societies biased towards certain
nationalities?
If so, do you believe there is a possible solution for this problem
in the near future, as for example integration programs?
I mentioned before that England & Wales and Portugal
have similar pro les in their foreign-national prisoner
populations – this is re ected in the fact that in each of
these two jurisdictions the bulk of the foreign prisoner
population originates from their former colonies. So in
Portugal you will nd the large part of foreigners in
prison are citizens from Cape Verde, Angola, Guine-
Bissau, Brazil and so on. In England & Wales this is
replicated to the former colonies of the UK: you nd that
the foreign-prison population is mostly composed of
citizens from the Caribbean nations, South East Asia and
former African colonial territories. This is not
coincidence, but rather a re ection of the historical
legacy of colonialism and the resultant histories of
migration, social exclusion and racial discrimination.
At this point, as I am still analyzing my data, I will refrain
from commenting on possible solutions.

6. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Ines Hasselberg ­ PaperHive Magazine
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Which researchers and/or articles you rely on the most for your work?
Mary Bosworth and Sarah Turnbull are my main sounding
board, and I also rely greatly on their work. Other
researchers whose work I rely on include Nicholas de
Genova, Susan Bibler Coutin, Mathew Gibney, Bridget
Anderson, Natalie Peutz, Tania Golash-Boza, Nando
Sigona, Melanie Grif ths, Marie-Benedicte Dembour,
Heike Drotbohm, Emma Kaufman, Miguel Moniz, Juliet
Stumpf, Sarah Willen… and really so many others. This
eld of studies has greatly expanded since I rst started
and new work is coming out frequently. I recently read
the work of Nancy Hiemstra, which was really fascinating.
So now I wonder whether I should have named anyone in
the rst place, as I’m sure I left out others whose work has
also been in uential to me…
PaperHive would like to ask you: If the reader had only 5 minutes,
what speci c pages or sections should they de nitely read to gain
insight into your research?
If the reader only has about 5 minutes I would suggest
that s/he reads the Preface to the book (and eventually
the rst couple of pages from the Introduction). The
preface to the book is an email sent to me by one of my
research participants. It is very powerful and describes
really well what is like to live with the uncertainty of
deportation. Alternatively, they can read this post
recently published by Allegra.Lab where I’ve included
and contextualised that email, and provided a short
insight to the book’s contents and arguments.
More on this story

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Manuel Bláuab
Editor-in-Chief Manuel Bláuab is a
journalist and writer from Argentina. Has
worked in radio, newspapers, theater and
online publications since early 2000's.
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