Between hope and hostility: The affirmative biopolitics of everyday smartphone geographies

Abstract

This paper explores what it means to hope under, within, and through everyday modes of affective hostile governance. Taking the empirical landscape of everyday digital life within the UK's asylum system, this paper outlines how smartphone practices are entangled with an everyday politics of hope. Holding the tension between hostility and hope, I centre an array of taken-for-granted everyday digital practices that have become central to hope production, circulation, and maintenance within periods of waiting for asylum seekers: from online gaming and lock screen photo choices to the creation of WhatsApp group chats. In the context of banal digital practices, I argue that what hope enables — defined as alternative attachments to life otherwise (materially, spatial-temporally, imaginatively) — is a form of agency that cannot simply be dismissed as cruel or futile within the broader context of systems that harm, injure, and erode. Instead, I highlight how the ability of hope to emerge alongside hostility in the UK's asylum system challenges us to reconceptualise everyday forms of digitally-mediated agency and power.