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This concluding chapter brings together the key themes from our research and raises questions about the developing politics of immigration control at the critical and fastchanging moment in which we complete this book.
In this chapter we:
- Contextualise the immigration regimes and debates within which our study took place
- Describe and discuss the Go Home van and related government communications in relation to broader immigration regimes and practices
- Summarise briefly our key findings from the research, which will be developed and elaborated on throughout the book
- Outline the approach that we took in the project as activist researchers
- Provide an overview of what is in the book
A researcher and a community activist discuss ways in which academic researchers worked with community organisations on researching the impact of Home Office immigration campaigns, the difference this collaboration has made, and some of the challenges such work presents.
This chapter draws on the framework of performance politics proposed by the political scientist Shirin Rai (2014). It discusses Operation Vaken as part of a deployment of theatricalised violence by the British state in recent decades in which performances of state power are directed at many audiences and serve to segment the population. Despite attempts to address a diversity of audiences, our research suggests that immigration policing communications and performances appear to be met with indifference or anxiety. They can also be re-interpreted through a popular cynicism that is influenced by a broader culture of anti-politics. The chapter explores the impact of such scepticism on the politics of migration, and asks whether there are possibilities for a politics based on mutuality.
Here we discuss what was involved in our research relationships, from those between ourselves as academic activists and ‘resisting others’ (Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010: 248) to our work with an established, profit-making research company, which we subsequently found also carried out work for the Home Office.