A Place for Convicts: The Fremantle Lunatic Asylum,Western Australia and John Conolly’s “Ideal” Asylum

This article considers the mid to late nineteenth-century world of the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, Western Australia. By examining the built environment of the asylum and the uses of spaces within its walls, it is possible to understand not just the experiences of the inmates, but to highlight attitudes towards the insane. The asylum was built under authority of the British Government, and later transferred to the Western Australian Government’s care. Reflecting on this volume’s theme of colonial institutions, this article will highlight the effects of center and periphery relationships on life within the asylum.     

Family,community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics

Abstract

This article explores how the medicalization of poverty in 19th-century aetiologies of insanity provided the basis for which the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum became an option for the relief and treatment of the poor. It is argued that the poor, their communities and poor law officials, by being key to the process of committal, were partially responsible for the asylum population and the role that the asylum played in the local community. The article explores how important poverty was in asylum admissions and, from an analysis of the length of stay of those entering the asylum, the number of patients for whom the asylum provided short-term respite. Using case histories of patients, the article argues for the asylum to be seen as part of the poor law process that discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor.     

‘ALL HIS WAYS ARE THOSE OF AN IDIOT’: THE ADMISSION,TREATMENT OF AND SOCIAL REACTION TO TWO ‘IDIOT’ CHILDREN OF THE NORTHAMPTON PAUPER LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1877–1883

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a case study of the patient case notes of two boys admitted to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum in the late 1870s. This case study is intended to provide a flavour of the asylum experience for two boys; John Wenborn aged 6 and Charles Luddington, aged 7, both deemed idiots and both removed to the county asylum. Although, the focus on two individuals provides a narrow case study their experiences will provide a window through which to analyse much broader themes such as, the changing social relationships taking place in Victorian Northamptonshire and the impact of the family in securing admission to a pauper lunatic asylum. This analysis will be set against a backdrop of the discussion of the practical uses of the asylum in the late nineteenth century and perceptions of the asylum within the community. This article will examine the mechanisms used to deal with children deemed unfit for ‘normal’ society, the experience and treatment of the children while residents of the asylum and the social response towards insane children within the wider community.     

Bishop Bickersteth’s Visitation Returns for the Archdeaconry of Craven,Diocese of Ripon, 1858

Abstract

In 1868, an article in the Yorkshire Post about the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum drew attention to Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of mental health care. It was because of this history, it was claimed, that Yorkshiremen had a special interest in the treatment of the insane. The purpose of this paper is to explore critically this assumption in light of the recent work on the Poor Law's relationship with the asylum. The growth and development of two asylums in the neighbouring North and West Ridings of Yorkshire will be compared and contrasted. The first part of the paper offers a brief explanation of Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of the institutional approach to the problems of mental health and the growth of institutions in the counties. Central to the paper will be an examination of how each county responded to the differing demands on its resources and how this impacted on the nature of care at each institution. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how Poor Law finances contributed significantly to the development of each institution.     

Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation

Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.     

The Liberal Paradox and the Politics of Asylum in Australia

This article interprets the politics of asylum in Australia in light of what James Hollifield calls ‘the liberal paradox’; that is, the trend amongst contemporary states towards greater transnational open-ness in the economic arena alongside growing pressure for domestic political closure. It begins with an outline of Australia's recent history of economic reform and of the discourse of globalisation that has been employed to legitimise the changes wrought by this transition. Focusing on the period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the article provides an account of anxieties associated with these changes and an analysis of government strategies to secure the support of disaffected sections of the electorate. Asylum policy is analysed in this context. The article shows how the policing of asylum seekers constitutes performances of political closure designed to assuage those made vulnerable by Australia's neoliberal economic trajectory. It argues that these politics of asylum are indicative of the tensions between transnational engagement and territorial closure faced by neoliberal states more generally.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

"Confinement of the higher orders": the social role of private lunatic asylums in Ireland, C. 1820-60

The period 1820-60 marked an era of transition and diversity in Ireland that rapidly transformed the face of Irish society. Inextricably linked with these processes was the expansion of Ireland's private asylum system. This system diverged from its British counterpart both in the socioeconomic cohort it served and in the role it played within the mental health-care system as a whole. The implementation of the 1842 Private Asylums (Ireland) Act, the first legislative measure geared exclusively toward the system, highlighted the growing importance of private care in Ireland as well as providing for the licensing and regulation of these institutions for the first time. To date, historians of Irish medicine have focused almost exclusively on the pauper insane. This article aims to shift this emphasis toward other categories of the Irish insane through exploration of the Irish private asylum system, its growth throughout the period, and the social profile of private patients. I shall also interrogate the trade in lunacy model through exploration of financial considerations, discharge and recovery rates, and conditions of care and argue that while Irish private institutions were a lucrative business venture, the quality of care upheld was apparently high. Finally, I shall argue that Irish private asylums catered primarily for the upper classes and briefly explore alternative provisional measures for other non-pauper sectors of society.     

Enter the myopticon: Uncertain surveillance in the Danish asylum system (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Asylum seekers in Europe face increasingly restrictive policy regimes across the continent. In Denmark, they are held at designated asylum centres while their cases are processed and are subject to limitations on their movement, education and employment, as well as to a degree of surveillance from both the state and the Danish Red Cross, which operates the majority of the asylum centres. While these structures are in some ways reminiscent of Foucault's panopticon, I want to suggest a counterpoint to the panopticon, which I call the ‘myopticon’ to indicate the near‐sightedness of the central surveying eye. The myopticon is a near‐sighted system of surveillance practices, knowledges and sanctions, deployed as though it were panoptic. I want to suggest that the uncertainty that has soaked through the Danish asylum system and profoundly affected the asylum seekers in it is not a byproduct of bureaucratic processing, but intrinsic to the operation of the myopticon. By drawing out points of distinction with Foucault's panopticon, I sketch the outlines of a new technology of power that has powerful consequences for the daily lives of asylum seekers in Denmark.     

Rethinking commonality in refugee status determination in Europe: Legal geographies of asylum appeals

The Common European Asylum System aims to establish common standards for refugee status determination among EU Member States. Combining insights from legal and political geography we bring the depth and scale of this challenge into sharp relief. Drawing on interviews and a detailed ethnography of asylum adjudication involving over 850 in-person asylum appeal observations, we point towards practical differences in the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics of asylum appeal processes as they are operationalised in seven European countries. Our analysis achieves three things. Firstly, we identify a key zone of differences at the level of concrete, everyday implementation that has largely escaped academic attention, which allows us to critically assess the notion of harmonisation of asylum policies in new ways. Secondly, drawing on legal- and political-geographical concepts, we offer a way to conceptualise this zone by paying attention to the spatio-temporality, materiality and logistics it involves. Thirdly, we offer critical legal logistics as a new direction for scholarship in legal geography and beyond that promises to prise open the previously obscured mechanics of contemporary legal systems.     

Dysfunctional domesticity: female insanity and family relationships among the West Riding poor in the mid-nineteenth century

"Dysfunctional domesticity" contributes to the growing reevaluation of the importance of the history of the family to understanding the history of insanity. Using patient case histories from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, this article examines representations of family life among poor in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Among the so-called moral causes of insanity, family relationships held a prominent place. Female patients more than male patients had their mental illnesses attributed to their domestic circumstances: the poverty of their home lives, grief over a death of friends and family, love and marital relationships gone wrong, and violence in their homes. The case histories reveal that poor women experienced many pressures in the domestic sphere, and insanity may have been one way to escape dysfunctional domesticity.     

Deliberation and Resecuritization: Australia,Asylum-Seekers and the Normative Limits of the Copenhagen School

In the lead-up to the Australian federal election in 2010, both major political parties represented the ‘unauthorised’ arrival of asylum-seekers as a security issue. This article explores the dynamics of this resecuritization of asylum in Australia, suggesting the case has important implications for both the securitization framework and Australia's treatment of asylum-seekers. The relationship between securitization and calls for an open debate about asylum-seekers challenges the securitization framework's normative claims about political debate and deliberation as a progressive development illustrative of desecuritization (the removal of issues from the security agenda). This case also illustrates that without political leadership to engage with the social and cultural context that allows the securitization of asylum to resonate with large segments of the Australian population, the exploitation of this issue for short-term political gain will continue.     

Care as mundane politics: contested familial refugee lives in Finland

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to draw from and manage their transnational family lives poorly recognized and supported. In result, refugees may end up in paradoxical subject positions of having to give up and take responsibility for their families, with their own experiences and understanding of familial life remaining secondary. These contradictions are heightened when familial concerns are among the reasons for seeking asylum, involving caring and uncaring relations. In this article, we analyze familiality as a form of mundane care politics in refugee situations, based on our study with asylum seekers and refugees in Finland.     

The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin

Asylum policies in Britain and in the countries of its EU partners are failing to cope with the demands made upon them. With migration pressures mounting and opportunities for legal immigration to many EU states restricted, larger numbers of potential migrants are turning to alternative means of entry and access, namely irregular migration and asylum channels. The responses of states to these challenges have been to adopt more restrictive policies and practices that have considerably changed the balance between immigration control and refugee protection. While states have the right to control entry and enforce their borders, the restrictive measures that have come to dominate policy-making and recent immigration enforcement initiatives in Britain and its European partners do not sufficiently discriminate between asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants, thereby failing to safeguard the right of refugees to seek protection. Current British proposals to move asylum seekers to 'safe areas' in regions of origin fail to understand the burdens, pressures and priorities of countries in the regions, fail to ensure effective protection for those in need, and are unlikely to deliver the UK policy objective of substantially reducing the numbers of illegal entries to Britain. What is needed is an approach that reduces the number of individuals seeking protection in Europe while maintaining the European tradition of providing asylum to those in genuine need. The 'missing link' in asylum policy that would respond both to the concerns of states and to the protection needs of refugees is more comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin. It is in this way that western asylum countries, including the UK, may best address the challenge of providing international protection to victims of persecution and respond to their own concerns about asylum.     

Creating a Deaf place: the development of the Asylum for Deaf and Dumb Poor Children in the early nineteenth century

ABSTRACT

By tracing the beginnings of the Asylum for Deaf and Dumb Poor Children, this article describes the first Deaf place in England. It argues that early Deaf places, like the Asylum, function as incubators necessary for the growth of Deaf culture. From its founding through its first move to a purpose-built campus, the central stakeholders – the founders, financiers, headmaster, teachers, and students – not only performed their roles but also succeeded in creating a place for Deaf people to come together and use sign language in large numbers. Even so, the Asylum was a divided place; poor children had a very different experience than their wealthy counterparts. Reconstructing the origins, policies, and evolving practices of the Asylum helps to understand the treatment of Deaf people, the value of Deaf places for this often-marginalized minority group, and the development of institutional landscapes for the Deaf.     

The Jim Crow Craze in London's Press and Streets, 1836–39

This article examines clothing in public lunatic asylums in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It considers the intentions of the authorities but also explores patient experience and agency, which have been notoriously difficult to access. Publicly funded (pauper) patients had to give up their own clothes and wear the asylum's standard apparel. Asylum authorities did not envision this as a uniform, either honorific or punitive, and claimed that imposed dress was intended to improve patients' behaviour and assist recovery. There was growing awareness that variety in dress could be beneficial and there were calls for some pauper patients to be allowed to wear their own clothes, but this was ultimately impractical within the economy of mass provision in the public asylum. Although clothing might have offered comfort to the impoverished, some patients were angered and humiliated by its imposition. Ill-fitting items and rough fabrics could be a daily, bodily, reminder to the wearers of the shame of their status as insane paupers. It did, however, offer some room for self-fashioning. Patients were able to make small but, in the circumstances, telling adjustments to the way they wore their clothes and their hair. If it was considered safe, they were allowed some minor possessions. Certain of these items, like spectacles and false teeth, were vital to basic agency and independence. Others, such as jewellery – and especially wedding rings – could help maintain a vital link with relationships in the outside world.     

Community Antagonism Towards Asylum Seekers in Port Augusta,South Australia

An overtly hostile response to asylum seekers was observed in questionnaire responses provided by residents of Port Augusta, South Australia in April 2002. A social construction approach to identity and representation was used to interrogate this antagonism within its social, cultural, political and geographical contexts. Asylum seekers were constructed as ‘burdensome’, ‘threatening’ and ‘illegal’, and opposition to them was set within the discursive framework of a ‘Self/Other’ binary. Enmity towards asylum seekers was articulated concurrently with overwhelming support for the Federal Government's exclusive and deterrence‐oriented asylum policies. However, vehement opposition was expressed regarding the government's decision to construct Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in close proximity to Port Augusta. Factors contributing to the respondents’ negative perceptions of asylum seekers include xenophobia (specifically Islamophobia), events of geopolitical significance, and problematic government and media representations of asylum seekers. An awareness of these factors is necessary to unpack and, potentially, to destabilise the negative constructions of asylum seekers circulating in contemporary Australian discourses. Their entrenchment in the national consciousness may lead to tangible social implications including fear, friction and ultimately violence between the ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, and this should therefore be countered. Community antagonism also contradicts notions of a culturally tolerant Australia and fosters electoral support for the policies of exclusion and deterrence that undermine Australia's commitment to international human rights frameworks.

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Yorkshire’s influence on the understanding and treatment of mental diseases in Victorian Britain: The golden triad of York,Wakefield, and Leeds

In the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more humane approach to the care of the insane in Britain was catalyzed in part by the illness of King George III. The Reform Movement envisaged “moral” treatment in asylums in pleasant rural environments, but these aspirations were overwhelmed by industrialization, urbanization, and the scale of the need, such that most asylums became gigantic institutions for chronic insanity. Three institutions in Yorkshire remained beacons of enlightenment in the general gloom of Victorian alienism: the Retreat in York founded and developed by the Quaker Tuke family; the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield led by Sir James Crichton-Browne, which initiated research into brain and mental diseases; and the Leeds Medical School and Wakefield axis associated with Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt, which pioneered teaching of mental diseases and, later, the first Chair of Psychiatry. Three other Yorkshiremen who greatly influenced nineteenth-century “neuropsychiatry” in Britain and abroad were Thomas Laycock in York and Edinburgh, and Henry Maudsley and John Hughlings Jackson in London.     

Forced migration and legal-spatial violence in the United States and Germany

Asylum laws cannot function without spatial technologies and practices. Refugee camps, detention centers and accommodation facilities, in addition to dispersal and residential obligations, highlight the spatiality of asylum laws and policies. They are not only designed to regulate forced migrants' movement and place them in alternative legal and spatial regimes, but they are also spaces where migrants’ legal rights are violated and access to integrating institutions are restricted. Based on findings from Germany and the United States, this paper argues that current asylum regimes are characterized by a system of legal-spatial violence; a process in which a form of violence is embedded in law, implemented through policies and formal processes, and realized and reproduced spatially. This entanglement between the law, space, and violence involves complex and paradoxical processes: immobility and internal bordering practices (where forced migrants are confined and their movement is limited), as well as forced mobility and situations of unbordering (where movement is forced, and where spatial restrictions are either repealed or replaced). These processes fragment and prolong the trajectories of forced migration. Compulsion, displacement, and the dispossession of rights—which constitute the process of forced migration—do not cease on entering Germany or the United States, but can continue. The rationale for legal-spatial violence goes beyond the securitization of forced migration and the control and deterrence of forced migrants, and also includes economic logic and profit making.     

“An Irregular and Inconvenient Pile of Buildings”: The Destitute Asylum of Adelaide, South Australia and the English Workhouse

The Destitute Asylum of Adelaide, South Australia, was the subject of a rescue excavation in 1983. This paper seeks to explore the possibilities for further archaeological research that can arise from a reconsideration of reports generated by such excavations. Using documents, plans, photographs, and the Asylum buildings as material culture in much the same way as artifacts are used, the research focuses on the questions of space and room use within the Destitute Asylum.