This chapter traces the forms of epistemic violence that asylum seekers are exposed to when using data from digital platforms to substantiate their claims for international protection. Drawing on a selection of decisions by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in the UK, it challenges accounts of generalised digital surveillance by showing how asylum seekers are forced to engage in more and more data wrangling without resources, time or equipment. In so doing, asylum seekers do not just have to make themselves surveillable but are confronted with a demand to know the contours and limits of surveillance on digital platforms. By introducing the concept of platform power, the chapter shows that asylum seekers face an impossible demand to know the unknowable. Platform power undoes the binaries of privacy/publicity, transparency/opacity, openness/secrecy, and monitoring/indifference. It also obfuscates the attempts to ascertain the likelihood of digital surveillance.

The principle of facial neutrality in evidentiary rules rests on an appealing premise: that equally applicable standards ensure fairness between opposing parties. However, this premise overlooks the enormous power disparities that can exist between parties. This dynamic is uniquely apparent in United States Immigration Courts, which have virtually no rules of evidence and consequently allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to leverage its institutional advantages against asylum seekers. This chapter takes hearsay as a case study. It examines how the hearsay evidence rule, which prohibits parties from introducing out-of-court statements to prove the truth of what is asserted in those statements, may favor powerful parties when applied symmetrically. Through the specific example of DHS Form I-213, Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien, a DHS form that records border interviews, I suggest that the Immigration Court’s permissive approach to hearsay evidence, though it applies equally to asylum seekers and the DHS, enables the DHS to introduce unreliable documents produced through coercion while affording those documents presumptive credibility.

This chapter looks at Romani migration to the Americas from a Canadian vantage point. It illuminates the continuities of transatlantic mobilities that have been peppered by moments of heightened visibility, a dynamic conditioned primarily by the interactions of kinship networks with the administrative state. One such visible moment was the arrival of Romani asylum seekers from Central and Eastern Europe to Canada in the early 2000s. The chapter places this episode into a wider migration context and, rather than foregrounding the singularity of this moment, it foregrounds the persistence of a Romani presence on the North American continent through less mediated moments. Relying on extensive oral histories and ethnographic fieldwork, it shows that Romani lives and diasporic ties have not only been shaped by Atlantic geopolitics, local realities and the connections between families and individuals, but also by attempts to control their movements seen by some as disorderly and dangerous.

Race had a key role in the construction of madness and literary value and thus in periodical production in asylums, especially in the United States. Contributing to a periodical enabled educated white patients not only to express their creativity, enlightenment, and agency, but to reclaim their citizenship, at least figuratively. The launch of the Meteor in 1872 by a former plantation owner and patient at the Alabama Insane Hospital, Joseph Alexander Goree, was an act of rebellion against the irony of losing his own liberty and rights once he was certified as insane. The periodical was part of a larger campaign of literary activity through which he demonstrated his erudition, high taste, and reason. Recasting himself as an ally and collaborator to the superintendent, Goree found empowerment in maintaining the high literary quality of his publication and keeping madness out of it. Yet, the Meteor was far from a homogeneous polished account of the asylum: during its irregular run, it embodied different viewpoints as well as Goree’s declining enthusiasm and growing discontent, as he realised that his project of self-empowerment would fail to earn him his freedom and rights.

This chapter engages with the issue of voice and freedom of expression by interrogating the function of the patient-editor. It explores the stories of the known editors and printers of the unpublished Moon (1882) of the New York City Lunatic Asylum and the first two series of the Gartnavel Gazette (1853–54; 1855), produced and internally circulated in the Glasgow Royal Asylum. The archives associated with these publications offer a glimpse into the relationships that periodical publishing involved. They show that asylum periodicals emerged out of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration – perhaps not unlike other similar publications at the time. This case study reveals that forces other than institutional supervision were at work. The editors’ class-based aesthetics and individual preferences in selecting material for publication, as well as conflicts among patients impacted asylum periodicals. The study of this newspaper also offers evidence that, far from polished records of asylum life, asylum periodicals embodied tensions. Patients’ grievances did find a place in their pages, even if complaints and attacks were softened with humour and irony.

Asylums’ adoption of printing and periodical publishing from the late 1830s was related to two major developments on both sides of the Atlantic: the growing accessibility of print and printing presses and the spread of the moral treatment of insanity. As the periodical press permeated daily life, and printing equipment became cheaper and easier to use, the introduction of presses into asylums was a practical move. The presses served multiple purposes: recreational, therapeutic, as well as administrative. This chapter identifies various factors that contributed to the introduction of printing in asylums and addresses concerns about the exploitation of patients’ labour hidden behind the theory of moral therapeutics. It also reflects on the symbolic meaning of the press, its association with civilizational progress, and the influence of such ideas on the early adoption of periodical publishing in America and Scotland. While presses were almost never bought solely for patients’ benefits, they offered novel opportunities for inmates to exercise initiative and agency as partners in the development of early psychiatry, as well as civilization.

The introduction provides a general description of asylum periodicals and a brief introduction to the publishing and medical contexts within which they emerged. Then it discusses the place of asylum periodicals in the ongoing disputes over the social function of psychiatry and mental institutions. I challenge the suspicion with which historians and literary scholars have approached asylum periodicals due to their dual function of serving both patients and institutions. While scholars have perceived asylum periodicals as defined by censorship and, consequently, inauthenticity and unknowability, I argue that asylum periodicals’ positioning does not compromise their value as historical records but requires different approaches to their study, borrowed from book history and literary and periodical studies. A recognition of asylum periodicals and their producers as agents in wider literary networks enables further consideration of these publications and an acknowledgement of their potential to facilitate the generation of new insight about asylums, their inhabitants, and nineteenth-century print culture.

Peter Ronaldson was an inmate of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum in the 1840s and contributed to the first issue of its Morningside Mirror. Soon after the publication of the periodical, Ronaldson escaped. Tracing Ronaldson’s story in the available records, the conclusion reflects on the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives out of partially preserved complex and fluid institutional experiences. It nevertheless argues that asylum periodicals are invaluable resources for understanding life in nineteenth-century institutions, suggests directions for further research using the publications, and highlights their relevance to mental health and Mad activism.

Asylum periodicals participated in complex exchanges of medical and general print that took place in the nineteenth century. Therapeutic publishing spread in different institutions through networks of physicians, who were keen to stay abreast of the newest developments in their discipline. Asylum periodicals themselves contributed to medical communication, once they were in circulation. When launching and supporting periodical publication, however, physicians were not purely driven by self-interest and the interests of their institutions. As asylum periodicals joined the wider networks of print, they enabled patients’ continuous engagement with literary culture and public life. This function was not secondary to most of the publishing projects, but it was an effect sought by physicians for the benefit of those in their care and to support the provision of healthy recreation, which was an important aspect of the moral treatment. The inception, development, and survival of asylum periodicals depended on the exchanges they facilitated – exchanges that were themselves enabled and often encouraged by physicians.

This chapter turns to the forces of unity that drove patients’ publishing projects, focusing on the role of asylum periodicals in construing and maintaining real and imagined communities within and beyond the asylum. Producing and consuming periodicals brought together various actors with distinct skill sets, enabling, to a degree, transgression of the institutional boundaries that otherwise kept different groups of patients separated. This transgression fed into the representation of the asylum community as a family on the pages of asylum periodicals, reenforcing the institutionally imposed family model, according to which patients were ascribed the role of children under the care and protection of a father-like superintendent and a motherly matron. However, asylum periodicals show not only the manifestation of this framework’s application but patients’ active engagement with these symbols. Finally, the chapter explores former inmates’ continuous involvement in asylum periodicals, suggesting that some patients formed lasting and meaningful connections during their stay in mental institutions and relied on the asylum for support during their reintegration into society.

The chapter completes my discussion of the inception of periodical publishing in asylums, by examining the histories of two of the first asylum periodicals published in America and Britain and their patient-founders: Barber Badger’s Retreat Gazette (Hartford Retreat in Connecticut, 1837) and John Reid Adam’s Chronicles of the Monastery (Glasgow Royal Asylum, 1842). It shows that the histories of early asylum periodicals were tightly intertwined with their founders’ fates, which was the major reason for the publications’ comparatively short runs. Furthermore, these founders were all patients with printing skills or, in the case of Adam, literary aspirations and willingness to learn, and the opportunity to print in the asylum played an important role in their lives and professional careers: for Badger, it was a way to continue providing for his family, while for Adam, institutionalisation constituted an apprenticeship that eventually enabled them to pursue a career in publishing beyond their discharge. Asylum periodicals allowed patients to apply their existing skills or gain new ones in the pursuit of their own aspirations and personal interests.

The work of Bourdieu and Foucault can help identify the processes and strategies bywhich the Irish Catholic Church gained dominance and control over the lives of itsmembers.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the increasing power ofthe Church in Ireland, not least by its control over key institutions.  People lived ‘inCatholic time and space’, internalizing systems of discipline and codes of conduct.The intricate knotwork of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ identity meant that Church dominationwas bound up with the drive to modernize and civilize the nation. The keymechanisms used to create obedient subjects were penitential practices, corporalpunishment, confession, and confinement. John McGahern’s fictionand memoir explore the ways in which Catholic corporal punishment and patriarchalauthority extended into domestic spaces. His writings offer a useful representation ofthese mechanisms of control and punishment, but also narrate quiet moments ofresistance.

A framing case study describes the 2018 surge of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from continental Europe to the UK in small boats to seek refugee status. The chapter then discusses international migration law. The chapter begins by presenting important concepts and historical trends from migration law, and the competing models of economic migration and crisis migration. It then describes in detail major components of the Refugee Convention, which sets international rules for determining whether an individual can be a refugee, creates rights for refugees, and shapes subsequent outcomes for individuals who are denied or lose refugee status. Finally, the chapter examines how international migration law interacts with topics discussed earlier in the book, including: law of the sea, human rights, armed conflict, criminal law, and environmental law.