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Books > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru provides an
extraordinary glimpse into the remote and difficult-to-access
island of Nauru, exploring the realities of Nauru's offshore asylum
arrangement and its impact on islanders, workforces, and migrant
populations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Nauru, Australia,
and Geneva, as well as a deep dive into the British Phosphate
Commission archives, Julia Caroline Morris charts the island's
colonial connection to phosphate through to a new industrial sector
in asylum. She explores how this extractive industry is peopled by
an ever-shifting cast of refugee lawyers, social workers,
clinicians, policy makers, and academics globally and how the very
structures of Nauru's colonial phosphate industry and the legacy of
the "phosphateer" era made it easy for a new human extractive
sector to take root on the island. By detailing the making of and
social life of Nauru's asylum system, Morris shows the
institutional fabric, discourses, and rhetoric that inform the
governance of migration around the world. As similar practices of
offshoring and outsourcing asylum have become popular worldwide,
they are enabled by the mobile labor and expertise of transnational
refugee industry workers who carry out the necessary daily
operations. Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru goes
behind the scenes to shed light on the everyday running of the
offshore asylum industry in Nauru and uncover what really happens
underneath the headlines. Morris illuminates how refugee rights
activism and #RefugeesWelcome-style movements are caught up in the
hardening of border enforcement operations worldwide, calling for
freedom of movement that goes beyond adjudicating hierarchies of
suffering.
Hunters and Collectors is about historical consciousness and
environmental sensibilities in European Australia from the
mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is in part a collective
biography of amateur antiquarians, archaeologists, naturalists,
journalists and historians: people who shaped the Australian
historical imagination. Dr Griffiths illuminates the way these avid
collectors and investigators of the Australian land and of its
indigenous inhabitants contributed a sense of identity at
colony-wide and eventually nationwide level. He also considers the
rise of professional history, anthropology and archaeology in the
universities, which ignored the efforts of the amateurs. Griffiths
shows how the seemingly trivial activities of these hunters and
collectors feed into the political and environmental debates of the
1990s. This book is outstanding in its originality, interpretative
insight and literary flair.
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