Search results
In 2020 the convergence of Brexit, COVID-19 and the ‘migrant crisis’ put Kent in the headlines as never before: images of refugees on beaches, lorries queued on the county’s motorways and the white cliffs of Dover crumbling into the sea were all used to support claims that severing ties with the EU was the best – or worst – thing the UK had ever done. In this coastal driftwork, Phil Hubbard considers the past, present and future of this corner of England, alighting on the key sites which symbolise the changing relationship between the UK and its continental neighbours. Moving from the geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel to the cultivation of oysters at Whitstable, from Derek Jarman’s celebrated garden at Dungeness to the art-fuelled gentrification of Margate, Borderland bridges geography, history and cultural studies to show how ideas of national identity and belonging take shape at the coast. In doing so, the author argues that the ongoing crises of global displacement, climate change and ecological disaster require an expansive geographical imagination, with the current fixation on the sovereignty of our national borders appearing increasingly futile at a time of rapid global change.
Almost everything you consume, from your weekly supermarket trip to the presents you order online, arrives by cargo ship. Shipping is the engine of the world economy, transporting eleven billion tonnes of goods each year. Despite the clear environmental crisis, shipping emissions have doubled since 1990 to more than one billion tonnes of CO2 – more than aviation, more than all of Germany, or even France, Britain, and Italy combined. As the shipping industry is forecast to grow threefold by 2050, full decarbonisation is urgent to limit catastrophic climate change. To understand whether there are any realistic alternatives to the polluting status quo of the container shipping industry, in 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days as part of a sailing crew aboard the Avontuur, a century-old two-masted schooner fitted for cargo. This book recounts both this personal odyssey and the journey the shipping industry is embarking on to cut its carbon emissions. It shows that the Avontuur’s mission remains as crucial as ever: the shipping industry needs to cut its use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will face excessive global warming and the dire outcomes that will bring. The book explores our path to an uncertain future. It argues that shipping symbolises the kind of economy we’ve built: a gargantuan global machine that delivers the goods at an enormous environmental cost. Merely eliminating carbon emissions or improving efficiency won’t solve the underlying issue. If we can’t make shipping truly sustainable, we can’t solve the climate crisis.
function for many years, in 1979 the building was bought by the British Council of Aid to Refugees as one of forty UK reception centres for Vietnamese boat people before they were rehoused elsewhere in the country. One of those who passed through Moyle Tower was Hahn Tran, who fled Saigon when the North Vietnamese army arrived in 1975, fearing that his father's migration from the communist north some years before would make his family a target. 7 After going into hiding, he and another brother fled the
Home Immigrant – Qaisra Shahraz I read and hear about immigrants. I meet them in my everyday life. I have taught them for nearly fifteen years. I am dismayed that there is constant negative news in the media about immigration and refugees. I am disappointed that some politicians appear to have no qualms about using immigration as a topic to whip up racism to win them votes. I hate it when migrants are scapegoated for economic problems and when they become easy targets for vilification and hate. Remember the targeting of the Eastern European and Polish
that it needed to quell – the migrant tide that washed up on our beaches. Pictures of young men striding casually past swimmers, fishermen and dog walkers on the Kent coast, abandoning their rubber dinghies behind them, consolidated discourses of contagion and threat. The government's response was that it was time to pull up the drawbridge on this invading force: in September 2020 trials were held using Border Patrol and Royal Navy boats to block the path of migrants and refugees crossing the Channel, following the Australian ‘turn back the boats’ model
Introduction Encounters between border-crossing migrants and their hosts take place in borderscapes, locations that both challenge established identities and transform familiar spaces into locations of difference, generating confusion and conflicts, but also promise what Bhabha ( 1994 ) has referred to as ‘newness’ and transformation. This chapter examines the literary representation of forced migrants in one newly emerged border space, the originally temporary and notorious refugee camp known as the ‘Jungle’, on the
Moving beyond the spectacularisation of Mediterranean borders … The spectacularisation of Mediterranean borders assumes a crucial, often disquieting role in the dramatic staging of refugee crises and migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, and also in the discursive framing of terrorism, migration pressures and religious conflict. Focusing on the spectacularisation process enables a critical investigation of the complex relationship between border regimes and regimes of in/visibility. Through spectacularisation, the complexity
of the snowball In Min drøm om frihet ( 2009 ) (‘My Dream of Freedom’), Amal Aden tells the story of how she grew up as a war orphan and child soldier on the outskirts of Mogadishu, and travelled to Norway as a child refugee, slowly becoming integrated in Norwegian society. Apart from the general sense of Norway being an economically rich society and part of the ‘global north’, there are very few stereotypical images of Northernness in the book. The image of the North as a place of snow and cold, however, is presented
her archive. But we must be wary of the tricks played on us by the archive. We can be seduced by artefacts and read into them what we will (I frequently am and probably do so too often). Symbolically, these two pieces perhaps signify something of greater importance – the lack of evidence around refugee, exile and émigré communities and individuals in Manchester. Alice’s story – her voice as a British-Russian, is frustratingly absent. Hers is a lived experience of movement and adaptation between two international contexts connected by the insatiable global need for
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.