199
*  Institute for Research on Ethnicity, Migration and Society (REMESO), 
 Linköping University, Sweden
 claudia.tazreiter@liu.se | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0225-5093
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 2 | 2023 | 199–216
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.2.09
Claudia Tazreiter*
The Migrant and Marginalized Body in 
Connection with Digital Technologies as a 
Prosthesis of the Monstrous
Keywords
migrant, marginalized, digital technologies, prosthesis, systematic violence, carceral 
archipelago
Abstract
This article situates the (human) body as a signifier for society at large, arguing that de-
velopments in many societies of structural and systematic violence that targets minori-
ties such as refugees and first nation peoples, points to a failure of democratic values. 
Using two examples, we elaborate technology and digital devices as prosthesis of the 
body, that are also acting as proxy for state violence. The first example is from the carcer-
al archipelago of Manus Island as a site of remote detention of refugees carried out by 
the Australian government. Refugees held on Manus Island describe the treatment they 
experience as torture. The second example is drawn from the Australian mainland, tell-
ing the stories of First Nations children subjected to abuse and violence in juvenile de-
tention centers. A judicial inquiry (Royal Commission) found that a systematic approach 
aimed at punishing children constituted torture. The concepts developed in this article 
are those of bordering and racialization, while the intertwining of human and “more 
than human life” helps to understand and challenge the necropolitical power evident in 
(liberal) capitalism.
Migrantsko in marginalizirano telo v povezavi z 
digitalnimi tehnologijami kot protezami pošastnega
Ključne besede
migrant, marginaliziran, digitalne tehnologije, proteza, sistematično nasilje, jetnišnični 
arhipelag

200
claudia tazreiter
Povzetek 
Članek obravnava (človeško) telo kot označevalec širše družbe in trdi, da razvoj struktur-
nega in sistematičnega nasilja v številnih družbah, ki je usmerjeno proti manjšinam, kot 
so begunci in staroselci, kaže na spodletelost demokratičnih vrednot. Na podlagi dveh 
primerov razvijamo argumentacijo o tehnologiji in digitalnih napravah kot protezah te-
lesa, ki obenem delujejo tudi kot posredniki državnega nasilja. Prvi primer se nanaša na 
jetnišnični arhipelag Manus kot mesto odmaknjenega pridržanja beguncev, ki ga izvaja 
avstralska vlada. Begunci, pridržani na otoku Manus, opisujejo jetnišnično obravnavo, 
ki jo doživljajo, kot mučenje. Drugi primer izhaja z avstralske celine in govori o zgodbah 
staroselskih otrok, ki so v centrih za pridržanje mladoletnikov podvrženi zlorabi in nasi-
lju. Sodna preiskava (Kraljeve komisije) je ugotovila, da sistematično kaznovanje otrok 
predstavlja mučenje. Koncepta, ki ju razvijamo v tem članku, sta koncepta meje in rasi-
zacije, prepletanje človeškega in »več kot človeškega življenja« pa pomaga razumeti in 
izpodbijati nekropolitično moč, ki je očitna v (liberalnem) kapitalizmu.
∞
Introduction
In this paper I develop the idea of the (human) body as a signifier of socie-
ty, while the current necropolitical order observed in many parts of the world 
points to a diseased version of democracy. Indeed, democracy as necro-democ-
racy is horrific in its materiality. Drawing on ideas from racial capitalism,
1
 abo-
litionism, and carceral geography,
2
 as well as feminist and queer studies,
3
 this 
paper tells the story of the Australian government’s incarceration and medieval 
punishment of refugees and First Nations children. These are not isolated cases, 
but systematic abuses applied to abject bodies on the Australian mainland and 
in the Exile Islands archipelago, where refugees’ bodies are tortured and treated 
as flesh. But the elaboration of the body as a prosthesis for other potentialities 
reveals not only a politics of resistance, but also possibilities for new imaginar-
ies of other futures. Here, new technologies and digitality are not just the usual 
1 
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
2 
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, ed. Brenna 
Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (London: Verso, 2022).
3 
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: 
Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

201
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
means of state surveillance of excluded and minoritized populations, but rather 
technologies are an affective prosthesis of the vulnerable body.
The skin of the body is a barrier or membrane that protects the organism from 
intruders, just as society can be visualized as a barrier commonly asserted in 
terms of a territorial border, that contains those inside as a cohesive body, with 
processes that sift and filter movement across the membrane.
4
 In today’s world, 
the body is subject to more far-reaching threats than disease, injury, and other 
bodily assaults that first come to mind when we defend ourselves and our bod-
ies. Rather, the endpoints of the established and deeply entrenched biopolitical 
systems of power and governance, manifest in a necropolitical order today are 
scattered throughout the world in racialized hierarchies that categorize bodies 
as worthy/unworthy as human/flesh in cycles of violence and destruction.
5
 It is 
this vicious extension of biopolitics to structured considerations of annihilation 
of targeted populations/bodies that frames the thinking of this paper. How can 
the human body be rethought from decolonial, radical feminist, abolitionist and 
queer perspectives to develop a radical vision of liberation? The work to disman-
tle the cartographies of domination, criminalization, and racialization that Ruth 
Wilson Gilmore’s research and advocacy represents
6
 revolves around the ques-
tion of whether radical labor and militancy produce not only resistance and op-
position, but also new values.
A prosthesis is an artificial body part that must be replaced due to trauma, dis-
ease, or other fractures. In this discussion, I would like to take up the idea of the 
prosthesis as a bodily appendage to augment that which is missing in the form 
of a digital capability. A smartphone becomes an extension of the human body, 
and in the example of refugees in remote places of incarceration (immigration 
detention), a prosthesis that truly leads to a form of sociability, connection, and 
relation, as the conditions of remoteness, exclusion, and deportation of refu-
gees to places of invisibility and silence mean that sociability and connectivity 
are intentionally removed—by the sovereign.
4 
Rainer Bauböck, “Rethinking Borders as Membranes,” in Rethinking Border Control for a 
Globalizing World: A Preferred Future, ed. Leanne Weber (London: Routledge, 2015), 169–78.
5 
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 
2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11; Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 
trans. Steven Corcoran (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
6 
Gilmore, Abolition Geography.

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claudia tazreiter
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the global risks that all living things face 
and are implicated in. These risks are always already in relation with each other 
and to contagion. Ultimately, these risks are unable to be controlled, meaning 
the permeability of borders of all kinds is a constant, especially the invisible and 
microscopic borders through which pathogens pass. I take this vision of per-
meability and consider its usefulness for the immigration border as well as for 
internal borders of marginalization and minoritization, such as the “borders of 
disappearance” in what is done by sovereign states.
I also reflect on Sara Ahmed’s writings on race and categorization through phe-
nomenological and affective registers of concepts, which she applies to every-
day life in her recent work on “use.”
7
 How can technological devices be thought 
of as prostheses for bodies that are isolated and captured in space and time? 
By building an argument and inquiry around the use and utility of an object, 
Ahmed’s intertwining with inanimate and biological life is apparent. That is, 
“use,” use-value and utility, and life itself are entangled
8
 and already (always) 
in relation with each other. And here, the entanglement of human and nonhu-
man, as well as more-than-human life, to be discussed later, proves important 
in shaking the dominant discourses and imaginaries of body/human and the 
neologism liberal/capitalism, deeply implicated in colonial racialization.
Borders, Barriers, Membranes
I understand border as a heterodox concept, conceived and used in various ge-
opolitical contexts as metaphysics and finally, as necropolitics. The heterodox 
aspect of borders and bordering is at once a potential for transformation and 
a limitation in a world dominated by an orthodox application of borders. The 
orthodox and dominant paradigm, discourses, and policy contexts of borders 
take shape as the territorial sovereignty of states, an order of exceptionalism 
rather than global justice.
9
 The geopolitics of migration borders impose penal-
ties on the most vulnerable populations, while global capital continues to find 
new ways to obliterate borders to theft and wealth transfer, including the theft 
7 
Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
8 
Ahmed, 69.
9 
See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone 
Books, 2015); Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2017); Mbembe, Necropolitics.

203
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
of land, resources, and intellectual property from local peoples such as Indige-
nous groups in many parts of the world.
10
The polysemic border is malleable and hybrid, a conceptualization that runs 
counter to an orthodox application of borders and migrants as subject to sover-
eign power and to exceptionalism. While the border refers to markets and hu-
man subjectivities, it also refers to differentiated ways of “being in the world” 
and marks values and histories that are carried through temporal and spatial 
domains-through mobile bodies and other entities.
11
 Importantly, the polysemy 
of border also resonates in forms of human and nonhuman subjectivity, hybrid-
ity, and multi-species experience as conceptualized and empirically discussed 
by writers, philosophers, and scientists who question the ultimate bounda-
ries between humans and all other lifeforms.
12
 The articulations of posthuman 
and more-than-human are instructive in codifying the forms of life that are en-
hanced or altered by new technologies, as well as the important nexus of mo-
tives and sightlines that connect past, present, and future. In addition, human 
and non-human actor networks are interrelated and thus require thought and 
consideration to identify connections and alignments. Science in the forms of 
technology and in social “uses”
13
 are the fields of human and non-human mate-
riality that are always already in association with each other.
14
 The connection 
I want to draw is that the body and the digital prosthesis are coextensive with 
each other.
10 
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous 
Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 
The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: Hau Books, 2015).
11 
Kate Coddington and Alison Mountz, “Countering Isolation with the Use of Technology 
How Asylum-Seeking Detainees on Islands in the Indian Ocean Use Social Media to 
Transcend Their Confinement,” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region 10, no. 1 (2014): 97–
112, https://doi.org/10.1080/19480881.2014.896104; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, 
Border as Method: Or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
12 
Braidotti, Posthuman; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and 
the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Donna J. 
Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Joseph 
Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham: 
Duke University Press, 2020).
13 
Ahmed, What’s the Use? 
14 
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1995), 11.

204
claudia tazreiter
The more-than-human frontier approach conceptualizes the impact of human 
society, economy, and technology on all of life. Moreover, the vitality of all oth-
er living things continues, despite the impact of the human-created systems of 
the dominant figure of homo economicus in capitalist production. Posthuman-
ism emerges across a number of disciplines and has its roots in Anglo-European 
political philosophy, which questions the centrality of humans as ontologically 
given, privileged, and separate from the rest of nature and nonhuman animals.
15
 
Many scholars articulating posthuman thought also call for the decolonization of 
research disciplines in which other worldviews and geopolitical histories, such 
as that of Latin America, contribute to unique decolonial theorization.
16
 While 
many epistemic traditions have historically naturalized the metanarratives of 
progress, expansion, and growth with humans at the forefront and the end-
less extraction of all kinds of resources and “things” from nature,
17
 others have 
more recently drawn attention to categories, narratives, and knowledge systems 
that eschew such orthodoxy. Joseph Pugliese, for example, explains the catego-
ries more-than-human and other-than-human as distinct from non-human and 
post-human.
18
 This distinction is important to emphasize the opposition to an-
thropocentrism that is presupposed in any use of the descriptor, human. Pugliese 
emphasizes his rejection in this regard and challenges human exceptionalism.
The explanation of racialization in human and nonhuman life is elaborated in 
necropolitics as the extraction of profit from the flesh of living entities.
19
 In this 
politics, death is not just an unintended by-product of the values that drive eco-
nomic production and consumption, but a deliberative nihilism in creating suf-
fering and death. The advocacy and artistic creations of Behrouz Boochani—a 
Kurdish-Iranian journalist who was detained on Manus Island in Papua New 
Guinea (PNG) for the next seven years beginning in July 2013—exemplifies digi-
tal resistance, but also much more. Boochani became known worldwide during 
the many years of his imprisonment, but his digital counter-life, using a cell 
phone as a prosthetic, is mapped across other refugees in the carceral archipel-
15 
Braidotti, Posthuman.
16 
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial 
Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
17 
Sven Lütticken, “Posthuman Prehistory,” Third Text 29, no. 6 (2015): 498–510, https://doi.
org/10.1080/09528822.2016.1235861.
18 
Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-than-Human.
19 
Mbembe, Necropolitics.

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the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
ago of Manus Island and the small island state of Nauru. Both locations have 
been contracted and paid by the Australian government to act as Australian 
prison guards for refugees in locations intentionally removed from the Australi-
an mainland. This paper examines the prison where refugees are held on Manus 
Island in Papua New Guinea in relation to the body and its digital prosthesis as a 
“more-than-human” relation, one that is a politics of resistance on the one hand 
and a new imagining on the other.
Manus Island is an example of how the geopolitics of borders can be used to ab-
dicate responsibility for refugees. It shows what can occur when policies, laws, 
and everyday practices turn human life into flesh in cycles of dehumanization 
and cruelty.
20
 Far from making life “disappear” through sovereign exceptional-
ism,
21
 these remote prisons have produced new forms of resistance as detainees 
create new life, coexistence, and collaboration with far-flung people in many 
parts of the world. This coexistence has a spectral presence, both felt and audi-
ble. A presence that reverberates in local life, in the lapping of the sea, and in the 
persistence of resistance and transgression by refugees and their supporters. The 
role of new digital technologies in this coexistence and collaboration is perhaps 
surprising when one transposes the hard metal objects and their associated pos-
sibilities for connectivity and storytelling to the soft bodies of the refugees.
For three decades, Australia’s carceral-border archipelago has produced numer-
ous sites of subjugation and death for displaced and exiled peoples. Austral-
ia’s relationship with PNG and Nauru demonstrates a neo-colonial dynamic as 
aid and development are part of the equation while developing nations remain 
dependent on richer nations to recover from the continuing legacies of coloni-
alism. A key feature of Australia’s border industrial complex of incarceration 
and violence is the multinational companies contracted to build, maintain, and 
20 
Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black 
Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
21 
See Claudia Tazreiter, “The Unlucky in the ‘Lucky Country’: Asylum Seekers, Irregular 
Migrants and Refugees and Australia’s Politics of Disappearance,” Australian Journal of 
Human Rights 23, no. 2 (2017): 242–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2017.1372039; 
Claudia Tazreiter, “Race, Migration and Visual Culture: The Activist Artist Challenging 
the Ever-Present Colonial Imagination,” in Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of 
Community, ed. Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz (Manchester: Manchester University 
Press, 2020), 113–32.

206
claudia tazreiter
manage the carceral sites. These companies include Transfield/Broadspectrum, 
G4S, Serco, IHMS, Paladin, and PIH. They have all secured remarkably lucra-
tive contracts without any oversight or accountability for the way they manage 
and care for the already traumatized people. In Paladin’s case, the contract was 
not made available for public tender. The privatization of immigration detention 
centers in Australia mirrors similar developments in other Western countries
22
 
and is being challenged by new abolitionist demands and movements.
23
Manus Prison and Digital Prosthesis of Resistance and Collaboration
As a writer, university teacher, and feminist activist, I spend a lot of time think-
ing about the various impacts of intellectual work and the importance of be-
ing present, engaged, and collaborating with the people (and other living enti-
ties) most impacted by violence and regimes of power. In mid-2019, I travelled 
to Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. I had been thinking about this trip for a 
long time, to visit and speak with the men and boys detained there. I wanted to 
bear witness to the lived experience of what politicians and much of the main-
stream media have reported and normalized under the label of “off-shore pro-
cessing.” The visit to Manus Island was prompted by conversations with jour-
nalist, writer, and refugee Behrouz Boochani, who was imprisoned on Manus 
Island, and his long-time collaborator Omid Tofighian. The trip to Manus Island 
was a sensory overload. Manus Island is geographically remote, of great natural 
beauty, with a small population and unrelenting tropical heat. On the flight to 
this remote island, the many stories of refugee suffering and abuse ran through 
my mind and triggered shame. My anticipation and excitement of meeting the 
refugees and also the locals, the Manusians, eclipsed any hesitation. The sights, 
sounds, physicality of this visit, as well as the recurring memories of the threads 
that draw lines between Australia and Papua New Guinea, between Australi-
ans and the refugees imprisoned for years, between Australians and Manusians, 
frame the motivation for this paper.
During the years Boochani was incarcerated in Manus Prison, he regularly pub-
lished in international media, gave speeches, posted and engaged in social me-
22 
Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago 
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
23 
Gilmore, Abolition Geography.

207
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
dia, participated in interviews, shot and co-directed a feature film, and wrote 
a book. These forms of intellectual and cultural production were written, pre-
pared and created using a mobile phone, with all texts typed, saved and sent 
via WhatsApp text messages. Together with his translator Omid Tofighian, they 
worked across the seas on the book No Friend but the Mountains, which was 
written and translated simultaneously, through the digital screen.
24
 The philo-
sophical vision and intellectual framework captured in this collaboration con-
tinue to take shape and have benefited from various working relationships and 
networks.
25
In 2017, Boochani and his collaborator and co-director Arash Kamali Sarvestani 
released the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, which documents life in de-
tention over time and is pieced together with hundreds of mobile phone clips 
and written texts. Along with other forms of visual and material culture and 
communication, this has given the Australian public access to counter-narra-
tives to the dominant government narratives that generate fear, mistrust, and 
hatred of refugees and asylum seekers. In the film, the story of the men and boys 
living in the prison-like immigration detention center is presented in narrative 
form. The film is a meditation on the way everyday life is like in the detention 
center on a remote island like Manus and gives Australians a glimpse into the 
physical and psychological stresses and traumas of the detainees. The film is 
particularly powerful in the context of Australian policies that have made asy-
lum seekers and refugees invisible to the Australian public—they have essential-
ly “disappeared” through media and information blackouts, which include visa 
restrictions on lawyers and human rights organizations. Chauka is the name of 
a solitary confinement cell in the detention center and also the name of a bird 
that is unique to the island and is the symbol of the island that adorns its flag. 
24 
Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, trans. Omid 
Tofighian (Sydney: Picador, 2018).
25 
See Behrouz Boochani, Claudia Tazreiter, and Omid Tofighian, “The Multiple Faces of the 
People Smuggler,” in Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia, ed. Ruth Balint 
and Julie Kalman (Sydney: NewSouth, 2021), 176–90; Claudia Tazreiter and Omid Tofighian, 
with Behrouz Boochani, “Spectres of Subjugation/Inter-Subjugation/Resubjugation of 
People Seeking Asylum: The Kyriarchal System in Australia’s Necropoleis,” in Regulating 
Refugee Protection through Social Welfare: Law, Policy and Praxis, ed. Peter Billings 
(London: Routledge, 2023), 68–90; Behrouz Boochani and Claudia Tazreiter, “Notes on 
Exile: Behrouz Boochani in Conversation with Claudia Tazreiter,” Australian Journal of 
Human Rights 25, no. 3 (2019): 370–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2019.1685768 .

208
claudia tazreiter
The singing of the Chauka bird is a constant aural presence that is regularly in-
terwoven into the film, as is the regular singing of a Kurdish folk song by one of 
the Kurdish detainees. Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is a film that defies easy 
categorization. It is neither a documentary nor a feature film. Rather, it is a po-
etic intervention that uses the visual medium of time to take the viewer in the 
unimaginable pain of separation experienced in incarceration. Ongoing conver-
sations between Manus Island locals reveal the deep significance of the Chauka 
bird and the persistence of colonial history on the island. As with other works, 
Chauka was possible on through many micro-visual and textual pieces transmit-
ted to collaborators via the prosthetic, smartphone.
With the release of the film Chauka, Boochani received numerous invitations 
to international film festivals for the premiere. However, the Australian gov-
ernment denied him a visa to enter the country. Nevertheless, with the help of 
his translator, friend, and collaborator Omid Tofighian and his prosthesis, Boo-
chani appeared for interviews at numerous public events and at the screening of 
his film on social media. In this way, the Australian public and an international 
audience have come to know the work, the face, and the voice of Boochani and 
his fellow refugee detainees. Boochani has also collaborated with a number of 
artists, including Hoda Afshar, to produce photographic and video works that 
comment on life in off-shore detention.
One work that illustrates this collaboration across distance and through digital 
means is the video Remain. It is a collaboration with refugees who have been de-
tained on Manus Island since 2013. It is a multi-layered work that addresses ab -
sence and invisibility. The work depicts the ongoing mistreatment of refugees, 
including the memory evoked by the refugees themselves of their murdered 
comrade Reza Barati, who was beaten to death by the guards of the detention 
center. Nevertheless, the work brings the viewer into the natural beauty of the 
island and evokes its own form of resistance.
Other refugees detained in Manus Island prison who have written and addressed 
the public about the twenty-three-day siege of Manus prison in 2017 include 
Hass Hassaballa and Mohamed Adam, whose posts detail the deliberate depri-
vation in which Australian authorities cut off food, water, medical supplies, and 
electricity as the refugees protested the conditions of their ongoing detention. 
Shaminda Kanipathi also published regularly while detained on Manus Island. 

209
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
Now that he has resettled as a refugee in Finland, he continues to write about 
his experiences of incarceration.
The Imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children
In what follows, I will discuss and describe the detention and mistreatment of 
First Nations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) children on mainland Aus-
tralia. These examples are distinct from the refugee stories described above, but 
the mistreatment by the colonial settler state of Australia is a common thread 
running through them, as is the potential of technologized means of resistance 
and documentation.
A young male body, clad only in long white pants, is in a bare white room, 
slumped and restrained on a large adjustable roller seat, shackled at the wrists, 
ankles and shoulders. A white spit hood covers the entire head of the young per-
son, wrapped around his neck with a thick black ribbon. The detail that identi-
fies this image as modern rather than medieval is the metal nature of the restraint 
chair. It is July 2016, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national 
broadcaster, is showing an hour-long documentary Australia’s Shame,
26
 expos-
ing the practices at the Dondale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territo-
ry. The documentary reveals the systematic mistreatment of children, predomi-
nantly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The story of one boy, Dy-
lan Voller, the 17-year-old boy mentioned above, is central to the story, although 
many other cases of abuse were shown, including the regular tear gassing of 
teenagers. The airing of the documentary sparked worldwide outrage and the 
government initiated a Royal Commission, an independent panel to investigate 
the circumstances and make recommendations. While the carceral archipelago, 
Manus Island and Nauru are invisible zones for journalists and the scrutiny that 
comes with it, in the case of the Dondale Youth Detention Centre, it was CCTV 
footage from inside the facility that allowed journalists to reveal the monstrosi-
ties and horrors to the public. It turns out that the technologized securitization 
of prisons also enables digital scrutiny of practices of harm and violence.
26 
“Video: Australia’s Shame,” Four Corners, ABC News, July 25, 2016, https://www.abc.net.
au/news/2016-07-25/australias-shame-promo/7649462.

210
claudia tazreiter
The Royal Commission recently presented its findings and uncovered a system-
atic approach to the punishment of children in Juvenile Detention Centres and 
also in adult prisons that constitutes torture. It has emerged that the North-
ern Territory is not alone in this practice. The states of Western Australia and 
Queensland were also found to be isolating and excessively punishing children, 
particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, in detention centers 
and prisons.
Banksia Hill Youth Detention Centre, the only youth detention center in West-
ern Australia, detains up to 600 children each year, sixty-three percent of them 
are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and many of them have severe neu-
rological impairments. This detention center has been found to regularly hold 
children in solitary confinement and uses the practice of restraining bodies of 
children called folding-up. In a documentary from 2022, such restraint involves 
guards forcing a handcuffed child onto their stomach, crossing their legs behind 
them and sitting on them.
27
 This practice is banned in other juvenile prisons be-
cause of the risk of suffocation and death. In Australia, children as young as ten 
are incarcerated in juvenile detention centers.
In the state of Queensland, it was found that boys as young as thirteen are sys-
tematically isolated in their cells for up to twenty-four hours a day at the Cleve-
land Youth Detention Centre. A thirteen-year-old Aboriginal boy, referred to as 
Jack in a Human Rights Commission report, spent a total of forty-five days in a 
cell while awaiting trial. The boy’s mother said her son claims he was not given 
water for extended periods in solitary confinement.
28
In examining the experiences of refugees imprisoned in remote islands and 
the mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australi-
an prisons, the transformation of the body as flesh in racialization into a body 
as digital prosthesis of resistance becomes clear. Death, injury, and torture at 
the border occur at, across, and because of the sovereign, territorial border out-
27 
“Video: Locking Up Kids: Australia’s Failure to Protect Children in Detention,” Four 
Corners, ABC News, November 14, 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/locking- 
up-kids:-australias-failure-to-protect/101652954.
28 
Ellen Fanning, “Queensland Government May Have Broken Own Laws by Locking 13yo in 
Detention Cell for Up to 24 Hours a Day,” ABC News, March 15, 2023, https://www.abc.net.
au/news/2023-03-15/qld-youth-crime-human-rights-watch-house-detention/102093378.

211
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
lined earlier, imposed is a deliberately limited application of responsibility for 
life and death. Yet forms of resistance continue to exist.
The body in pain and the causes of that pain are the focus, which brings the 
threads together. Reflecting on the body’s response to pain and torture, as seen 
in the sites of refugee detention and also the detention of First Nations children 
in Australia, show how the world is made and unmade by the body in pain.
29
The object relation, here to digital devices and other technologies such as CCTV 
cameras as bodily prostheses, becomes an expression of connection and story-
telling. The use value of things
30
 are a relation that connects, telling stories but 
also recording abuses of the body. Refugees in remote sites of incarceration use 
mobile devices as an extension of the human hand. This digital device they hold 
reaches to all corners of the world, transmitting the affective register from son 
to mother. It sends textual and visual content produced in places of torture and 
detention to collaborators in countless locations.
The Racial State and Contemporary Bordering Practices
I now return to the concepts of border and race by reflecting on the examples 
discussed above and the relation to body and digital prosthesis. The deeply ra-
cialized histories of colony and empire, and the connections between these his-
tories and modernity, liberalism, and capitalism, demand attention to unpick 
contemporary bordering practices and logics that manifest in punitive borders.
31
 
State racialization of minoritized populations is evident in institutions such as 
hospitals, schools, and churches, which have been normalized over time as le-
29 
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1985).
30 
Ahmed, What’s the Use?
31 
See Michael Grewcock, “Australia’s Ongoing Border Wars,” Race and Class 54, no. 3 
(January–March 2013): 10–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396812464010; Michael Grew -
cock, “ ‘Our Lives Is in Danger’: Manus Island and the End of Asylum,” Race and Class 
59, no. 2 (October–December 2017): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396817717860; 
Satvinder S. Juss, “Detention and Delusion in Australia’s Kafkaesque Refugee Law,” 
Refugee Survey Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 2017): 146–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdw 
020; Claudia Tazreiter, Asylum Seekers and the State: The Politics of Protection in a Security-
Conscious World (London: Routledge, 2004); Tazreiter and Tofighian, with Boochani, 
“Spectres of Subjugation.”

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claudia tazreiter
gitimate practices in governing populations.
32
 In the Australian context, colo-
nial settlers’ systems and practices of governance directed against Indigenous 
populations since violent colonization in 1788 demonstrate systematic violence 
and annihilation of minoritized populations premised on racial hierarchies as-
signed to human life.
33
 Nursing facilities have often been the sites of such sys-
tematic practices carried out on Indigenous Australians.
Racial capitalism commodifies life itself, with the legacies of colonialism de-
ferring or indeed masking responsibility for crimes (slavery, land theft, cultur-
al genocide, etc.), perpetuating gross violations of the fundamental rights of 
humans and other living entities—as “human flesh” and other life forms are 
treated merely as resources.
34
 Racialization occurs when discrimination creates 
artificial hierarchies according to entirely arbitrary categories or identities: skin 
color, sexual preference, etc. Over time, the systematized ways in which some 
living beings are treated as expendable “thing” or as waste become imprinted in 
systems of power and dominance, as well as in social attitudes and mentalities. 
Racialization, then, refers to the myriad discriminations that create hierarchies 
of values that do real harm to the living entities devalued in these neocolonial 
processes, as well as the contemporary manifestations of these processes and 
values. The exploitation of resources and the unlimited use of living entities as 
“flesh” rather than precious life occurs in myriad material and immaterial ways. 
The transformation of humans into flesh is perhaps most clearly seen in slav-
ery.
35
 Robinson estimates the dollar value of “lost lives” and “theft” in enslave-
ment—a value that is enormous using the liberal actuarial logic of compounding 
time on money. Looking at Achille Membe’s theory of necropolitics, we see that 
the multi-generational, and indeed, multi-species impacts of colonial practices 
of theft of living beings and resources through cycles of colonial expansion over 
32 
Braidotti, Posthuman; Donna J. Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitu-
tions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural 
Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 3–43, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1-1-3; Mbembe, Critique 
of Black Reason.
33 
See Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; Jasbir K. Puar, The 
Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Marilyn 
Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the 
International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
34 
Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason; Mbembe, Necropolitics; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.
35 
Robinson, Black Marxism.

213
the migrant and marginalized body in connection with digital technologies . . .
the past centuries are still felt today in the form of contemporary inequalities, 
poverty, and violence in many parts of the world.
Conclusion
It is noteworthy that the descriptions of debordering, post-border worlds, and 
“more-than-human” borders described in this paper, point to the persistence 
of the colonial imaginary in contemporary life and geopolitics. This geopoli-
tics manifests itself in forms of racism, discrimination, and erasure that can 
be observed in the systematic devaluation of certain categories of humans and 
many other forms of life and ecological systems. The migrant body, as well as 
the Indigenous body, are particular targets of state control, restraint, and sep-
aration, subject to punitive sanctions by the state. The historical treatment of 
Indigenous population in Australia and elsewhere continues today in cycles of 
violent subjugation.
The activists and theorists I refer to in this paper collectively offer a powerful cri-
tique of the racial capitalist necropolitics that cause the pain I describe. A key 
aspect of the nihilism of the systems of domination and violence is aptly charac-
terized by Wendy Brown’s assessment of the end-stage of neoliberalism, which 
she summarizes as follows: “Free, stupid, manipulable, absorbed by if not ad-
dicted to trivial stimuli and gratifications, the subject of repressive de-sublima-
tion in advanced capitalist society is not just libidinally unbound, released to 
enjoy more pleasure, but released from more general expectations of social con-
science and social comprehension.”
36
The harms and pains described in this paper are profound. They undo the 
world. The forms of resistance, often in creative forms, simultaneously point to 
new ways of making the world.
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