Refugee Identities and Voices from within the Australian Carceral Regime

Over the past decades, forced migration processes have globally intensified due to dramatic events that have reshaped the geopolitical order worldwide. With hardline politicians instrumentalizing the refugee issue to foment nationalist discourses and gain consensus among voters, asylum seekers and refugees have engaged in digital spaces to reappropriate their self-presentations and resist obliterating forms of marginalization and subjugation. However, while discourses about and against forced migrants as disseminated by mass media and digital media have been extensively studied (see e.g., Pelinka 2018; Wodak 2015; Krzyżanowski and Wodak 2009; Baker et al. 2008), counter-discourses and self-representations constructed by refugee subjects both in digital and non-digital contexts have been scarcely explored. Therefore, the present chapter examines the discursive counter-productions articulated by a group of twelve refugees who were detained in offshore facilities and onshore transit centers within the context of the Australian border policy. The research applies the Discourse-Ethnographic Approach (Krzyżanowski 2017; Oberhuber and Krzyżanowski 2008) to the purposely built Refugee Interview Corpus with the aim of foregrounding the refugees’ representations of the Self and the Other within the wider digital and non-digital contexts in which these were embedded. In addition to giving prominence to the participants’ diverse voices and multifaceted perspectives, the chapter explores how refugees constructed their own individual and collective identity vis-à-vis the identity of others in the interview format; and examines the discursive strategies through which these representations were articulated. To address these research goals, the work adopted Jones and Krzyżanowski’s Theory of Belonging (2007), which applies a multileveled taxonomy to the study of migrant identities, in conjunction with the analytical tools of the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak 2015). Findings revealed how refugees negotiated their sense of self, enacted practices of identity, relationality, resistance, and exposed the systemic violence produced by the Australian carceral regime.