This paper explores the tensions and contradictions in asylum work. Drawing on ethnographic data from two asylum offices in England which includes observations of asylum screenings and interviews with asylum officers and applicants, I explore how frontline staff perceive their role. They portray themselves as bureaucrats devoid of any agency and insist on a depersonalized ideal of professionalism (detached, objective, impartial) which, they claim, they rigidly follow. Yet, their everyday encounters with ‘clients’ reveal profound moral and emotional struggles to come to terms with these professional expectations. I locate these struggles within competing institutional norms and officers’ personal and professional trajectories. In so doing, the paper foregrounds moral sentiments as a critical aspect of state power and in its unstable, open-ended, and fluid operation.

Successive Westminster governments over the past decade have increasingly committed to take ‘vulnerability’ seriously, pledging to recognise, criminalise and relieve various forms of re-discovered human misery. Meanwhile, law enforcement as an institution has faced heightened global public scrutiny, with its legitimacy cast as a subject of popular debate. In response, UK police forces increasingly assert that the ‘protection of vulnerable people from harm’ is one of most important goods that they pursue, blending this objective with more ‘classic’ law-and-order justifications. Moreover, a core benchmark in official inspections of UK police force effectiveness since 2015 is the identification, protection and support of ‘vulnerable people’. To this end, police forces have restructured, creating specialised public protection departments to operate alongside conventional patrol and investigative teams.

Based on ethnographic research in UK police forces, this paper examines the everyday justifications and tensions inherent in vulnerability policing. Public protection officials commonly assert the comparative advantage of their uniquely relational and compassionate style of working that differentiates them from typical manifestations of law enforcement; and they see their work as uniquely positioned to gain victims’ trust, transform their lives and, in the process, challenge discourses of the police as unresponsive and/or uncaring. As such, their will to care is part of a broader project of rebuilding legitimacy in contemporary policing across the Global North. It features a recursive logic that takes failure as its condition of possibility and deploys officials’ emotional-moral labour at the coalface of multiple crises facing the UK public sector today.

The right to claim asylum was borne of resistance, in that it was traditionally used to protect political dissidents, and thus it can only be sustained through resistance. I explore how the UK governments’ pathologically punitive treatment of asylum seekers gives rise to new forms of resistance by frontline workers within immigration bureaucracies. In particular, I seek to investigate how Asylum and Immigration Tribunals in the UK are sites of contestation and struggle against the hostility and structural violence that border bureaucracies perpetuate. I consider whether Home Office Presenting Officers, who perform a quasi-legal function in defending government administrative asylum decisions in the tribunal setting, can be conceptualised as what Meyerson and Scully (1995) refer to as ‘tempered radicals’. Tempered radicals are individuals who are stimulated to resist forms of oppression within their organisations. While these individuals are generally committed to their organisations, they are simultaneously committed to a cause or ideology that fundamentally contradicts the dominant culture of their organisation (Meyerson and Scully 1995). Emotional turmoil brought on by this fundamental tension within the self, motivate them to act in ways that undermine organisational orientations, usually in moderation, and often in subtle ways. For such individuals, their unique moral challenges and ambivalent identities allow them to strategically reshape their context and act in ways that subvert asylum appeal outcomes. These forms of resistance are likely to be cultivated through contestation of the exclusionary political and legal mechanisms encountered in their work and are a way in which their radical identities within their organisation can be sustained. This theoretical analysis of resistance precedes an in-depth empirical investigation of Home Office Presenting Officers and their capacity for resistance within UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunals.

This paper is part of a panel which pulls together emerging research findings and work-in-progress papers from members of the Vulnerable State Project (VSP) team at the University of Warwick. The VSP explores the ambivalent and shifting governance of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains by focusing on the life worlds of frontline staff. The project traces the apparently competing logics, values and affects of care / humanitarianism and coercion/punishment in the working lives of these state workers, theorised as operating within a punitive-humanitarian complex. Ultimately, the aim is to produce a reconceptualization and reframing of state power from below.

This specific paper unpacks a visual analysis of digital content linked to prison staff recruitment campaigns published since 2018. It explores cultural and occupational representations of prison staff labour, prison staff identities, and prison staff relations with a focus on the affective tropes adopted in these recruitment campaigns. The paper explores the impact sensorial but mostly visual imagery has in crafting a moral aesthetic of prison work. It also explores how, within such imagery, the institution of the prison is represented vis-à-vis both its staff and its prisoner population. With these iconic representations in mind, the paper seeks to rethink how prisoncraft is enacted and embodied in public, cultural representations.