The digitally connected asylum seeker: On the (post) (non, less than, sub, partial) human

The proliferation of smartphones across everyday life has forced us to rethink human subjectivity, and subsequently, who counts as the ‘digital’ or ‘posthuman’ subject. As we have learnt from recent contributions towards critical posthuman thought, not all digital subjects are the same; in fact, reproducing universalised ideas of digital subjectivity has been a key critique. Responding to Gillian Rose's (2017) call to re-think the human, this paper offers a provocation for how continuing to theorise the (non, less than, sub, partial) human within the UK's digitalising asylum system remains necessary to ground ongoing legacies of colonial violence in the (re)making of the Othered subject. Tracing three key genealogical moments where the ‘digitally connected asylum seeker’ has become hyper-visible in UK and Western European discourse – (1) the risky, (2) suspicious, and (3) governable asylum seeker – I contend that it is precisely the tension between imaginaries of the subject (i.e. of the asylum seeker and the connected smartphone subject) that get exposed, fragmented, and demystified in these moments. In this collision of subject imaginaries, I offer a key reflection for critical posthumanism: how do we reckon with the posthuman subject who was never considered (fully) human in the first place?