Everyday digital dis/connection: Locating slow violence in (non)encounters with the UK asylum state

Abstract

Encounters with, within and between digital technologies have become characteristic of life in the contemporary moment. This is, often, no different for displaced individuals seeking asylum across European states. Smartphones have become part of the everyday ‘doing’ of life for individuals governed through asylum systems which now includes routinely encountering the state. Whilst smartphones are commonly said to offer the promised affordances of increased connection or communication, this paper aims to explore how everyday encounters with the UK asylum state fall short of these imagined expectations. In its place, the paper identifies how a series of ongoing (non)encounters—encounters that fail to manifest in expected ways; characterised by pauses, delays or voids—become characteristic of the everyday experience of being a digitally connected asylum seeker in the UK. Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic research project with people actively seeking asylum in the UK between 2022 and 2023, this paper thus explores how the increased uptake of smartphone affordances within the UK asylum system contributes to the ongoing administration of state slow violence: experienced as exhaustion through everyday digital (non)encounters. Developing the concept of the (non)encounter for geographic research, this paper outlines how forms of dis/connection become characteristic of the state encounter for asylum-seeking individuals. These modes of dis/connection are traced as slow violence along the contours of neoliberalisation and hostile assemblages of asylum governance within the UK context.