Lunchtime seminar: Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru

Join us from 1- 2pm on Thursday 23 February to explore the true costs of offshore processing, when Kaldor Centre Director Jane McAdam talks to Julia Morris about her new book, Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru (Cornell University Press, 2022). This lunchtime, interactive seminar will allow time for audience questions. 

Morris draws connections between Nauru’s colonial history of phosphate mining and the new ‘human extractive sector’ of asylum. Her extensive fieldwork ranged from Nauru to Australia, Geneva and the archives of the British Phosphate Commission. Her book goes behind the scenes to the everyday running offshore processing in Nauru, uncovering what happens underneath the headlines and how it impacts islanders, activists and others. 

Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru also looks to the broader context, considering whether asylum ‘outsourcing’ is enabled by the mobile labour and expertise of transnational refugee industry workers who carry out the necessary daily operations.

A political anthropologist and migration studies scholar, Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington whose research focuses on the commodifying of human mobility.

This event is jointly hosted by the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Forced Migration Research Network and the Institute for Global Development at UNSW Sydney.