Migrant Detention, Subalternity, and the Long Road Toward Hegemony

ABSTRACT

Over the past 25 years, migrant detention and criminalisation has steadily increased in the United States. This state of affairs has triggered social workers to advocate through policy and service on behalf of migrants. In order to evaluate contemporary practice, a critical position is generated through a genealogy of social work practice with migrants where the colonial archeology of contemporary social work practice is found in the history of the settlement movement. Here, an irony becomes apparent within social work. Social work practice is a settler colonialism paralleled by Gayatri Spivak's reading of colonial discourses resulting in the subaltern condition. Following Spivak's analysis, social work advocacies affirm migrant subalternity by re-presenting the migrant as an image of nonagentive victimhood while simultaneously representing migrants through political advocacies on their behalf. As a liberation ethics counter to the colonial discourses, Spivak's exit of subalternity as the road to hegemony is drawn for social work practice. In this effort, Indigenous Action Media's distinction between allies and accomplices is central to develop a social work practice as an ethics of liberation. Social workers thus become accomplices with criminalised and detained migrants on the road to hegemony.

KEYWORDS:

• Subalternity
• social work ethics
• migration
• subaltern studies
• carcerality
• detention
• criminalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Paddy Farr is an Independent Researcher and Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Paddy publishes both empirical and theoretical papers on post-colonial and intersectional feminism, Queer theory and critical race theory.