Carceral Witnessing and the Spatial Imagination

Britain’s dispersed border constitutes an interrelated network of violence perpetrated through the built environment and multiple spatial legalities. In this chapter, I aim to uncover how solidarity infrastructures embedded across the immigration detention estate are built from and within modes of witnessing underpinned by the ‘transformation of silence into language and action’ (Lorde, The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980, 42). Throughout the chapter, I draw from an archive of written and recorded testimonial material and employ a feminist critical spatial practice to locate the quotidian effects of detention’s spatial and temporal injustices on the body. Furthermore, I suggest that the ‘spatial imagination’, a tool for material action, is integral for the creative reconceptualisation of space and the construction of solidarity infrastructures. The spatial imagination serves to challenge the materiality of carceral regimes as dominant and totalising, recognising the internal border as an infrastructure that, through its indeterminacy, leaves open the possibility of resistance.