Scholarship on asylum often overlooks bureaucracy, folding its associated sites and practices into the broader, more overtly violent spaces and systems in which they take place. Yet, this thesis demonstrates that contributions which only focus on overt or more visible forms of violence are not necessarily indicative of asylum seekers’ daily experiences. They also inadequately reflect how a modern state governs the lives of those seeking asylum, from the everyday intimate experience of state-enforced destitution, through to the structural dynamics that threaten and enforce the detainment and removal of individuals from Britain; though seemingly disparate experiences, both are part of a broader political agenda for making life unliveable for unwanted migrants. Making connections across these different modes of violence and the logics through which they operate underpins the aims of this thesis.

Based on 16-months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 11-months as a Signing Support volunteer at a Home Office reporting centre, I argue that Home Office reporting provides a critical site for understanding how these various modes of violence come together. By drawing together aspects of Hannah Arendt’s poignant analysis of bureaucracy with feminist theorisations of violence, I argue that the threat of physical force plays a constitutive role in creating a politically induced condition of precarity amongst asylum seekers. Yet, as I will explore, these sites can never fully extinguish the possibility of resistance and by appropriating a Rancièrian notion of dissensus, I show how both asylum seekers and Signing Support volunteers who offer support to those reporting, find ways to disrupt the ‘going-on-being’ of these operations. I argue that these forms of resistance have oftentimes, indeterminate political outcomes, yet are an important form of politics in momentarily challenging these operations.