Corporate Ethics and the Architecture of Asylum maps the built infrastructure of Australia's offshore detention regime — Manus Island and Nauru — as sites where architecture, law, and corporate power converge to define the legal and spatial limits of human rights.
About This Book
At the centre of this book is a provocation: that the regional processing centres constructed and maintained by multinational contractors in Papua New Guinea and Nauru are not merely logistical facilities, but architectural instruments through which sovereignty is exercised and contested. Jennifer Ferng repositions asylum as a dynamic, evolving countermeasure to xenophobia and state authoritarianism, drawing on visual and textual evidence that ranges from seventeenth-century painting to artificial intelligence and legal testimony. Across six chapters, she traces the intellectual entanglements of care, environmental precarity, and human rights that give physical form to offshore processing — and demands that architects reckon with their discipline's complicity in these systems.
Key Features
- 190 pages of interdisciplinary analysis combining architectural theory, legal discourse, and visual evidence
- Author: Jennifer Ferng
- Case studies centred on the regional processing centres of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, and Nauru
- Published by Routledge
What You'll Discover
- How multinational contractors have become dominant historical actors in shaping the spatial conditions of asylum, displacing traditional security frameworks
- The ways architecture and law intertwine as epistemic models for understanding — and challenging — offshore processing regimes
- A reading of visual culture from Rembrandt's De Nachtwacht (1642) through to recent advances in AI as tools for picturing and resisting state authoritarianism
- How environmental precarity and human rights discourse are embedded in the physical fabric of the Manus Island and Nauru processing centres
About the Author
Jennifer Ferng is the author of this interdisciplinary study connecting architectural history, legal theory, and ethics. Her work engages with questions of corporate accountability, human rights, and the built environment as instruments of political power.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 190
- Dimensions: 241 x 162 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781032461984
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and spatial practitioners engaging with ethics and human rights, legal scholars with an interest in built environment governance, researchers in refugee studies, postcolonial theory, and anyone interrogating the political conditions that shape architectural production.