Scales of Belonging Speaker Series, UF Center for Humanities and the Public Sphere
Between 2016 and 2019, thousands of migrant children were detained at the Homestead Temporary Shelter, a detention camp in South Miami-Dade County, Florida. Though ostensibly a place of humanitarian refuge for “unaccompanied” and asylum-seeking children, detained children were exposed to harmful sounds and toxic material from an adjacent military base. This talk tells the story of the detention camp in relation to the military base, which is a crucial node in the hemispheric circulation of weapons, soldiers, and military expertise. By thinking across space and scale, an ethnographic approach challenges ideas of detention camps as spaces of exception and instead understand them as porous, permeable, and embedded within suburban landscape.