Description
In this paper, I argue for a topological approach to carceral space, to think creatively about how carceral spatial practices are, first, put to work in humanitarian responses to refugee mobilities and, second, open up new economic relationships in the process. The shift from camps to urban refugee and asylum-seeker accommodation and the use of non-penal infrastructure to house them has changed how disciplinary norms are mobilized. In this paper, I first argue that we need to unfix our conceptualisation of the carceral from enclosure. Second, I argue that these carceral topologies produce new operations of extraction in refugee humanitarianism. I explore how new configurations of urban hosting create opportunities for extraction that are not easily captured by theorisations of carceral enclosures alone.
