Professor Mary Bosworth is founder and Co-Director of Border Criminologies, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on the intersections between criminal justice and border control. In addition to being Professor of Criminology, she is a Fellow of St Cross College. Prof. Bosworth conducts research on the experiences of staff and incarcerated people in prisons and immigration detention centres and about the processes of deportation.
Based on four years of empirical research, much of which was conducted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control reveals a system that dehumanises those subject to border control as well as those who operate it. While its outcomes may feel punitive for those subject to it, unlike the more familiar sites of long-term immigration detention, this system is not obviously penal it in its design or execution. And yet staff are trained in and entitled to use force and people’s liberty is taken away.
Exploring the tensions between these elements Bosworth turns to studies of infrastructure and logistics, to consider how they might further our understanding and critique of this system.