A space of interrogation: opening the black box of asylum adjudication 

I examine the spatiality and practice of asylum adjudication in the context of the Danish asylum system. People who make an asylum claim in Denmark are required to participate in interviews conducted by the Danish Immigration Service. These interviews serve as the principal way through which the Danish state gathers evidence, assesses a person’s credibility, and determines an asylum claim. Bringing together insights from feminist political geography and feminist legal theory, I conceptualize the asylum interview as a quasi-legal space marked by wildly uneven but also uncertain power relations. I illustrate how the asylum interview and its ‘internal’ power dynamics are connected to and informed by other geographical sites, policing practices, and imaginations across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales. While state authorities and politicians often represent the asylum interviews and the spaces in which they take place as impartial and sequestered from politics of any kind, I argue that the asylum interview is more akin to the quasi-legal dynamic of police interrogations. 

Dr Malene Jacobsen is a NUAcT Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. She is a feminist political geographer working at the intersection of political geography, critical refugee studies, and feminist legal theory. Malene has published on issues related to the geographies of war and refuge, families’ struggles to end forced separation, the politics of dispossession and refusal, as well as the legal re-writing of refugee protection. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Malene recently completed the EU-funded research project ‘JustAsylum’, which explored the lived realities and spaces of asylum adjudication.