Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex

This book presents the for-profit Direct Provision asylum system in the Republic of Ireland describing and theorizing the remote asylum centres throughout the country as a disavowed incarceration system, operated by private companies and hidden from public view.

The book combines historical and geographical analysis of the Direct Provision system with a theoretical analysis of the disavowal of the system by state and society and with a visual autoethnography via one of the authors’ Asylum Archive and asylum diary, both acting as a first-person narrative of the experience of living in Direct Provision. The book argues that asylum seekers, far from being mere victims of their experiences in Direct Provision are active agents of change and resistance, and theorizes the Asylum Archive project as an archive of silenced lives that brings into public view the hidden experiences of the asylum seekers living in the Direct Provision system.