The intimate borders of epidemiological nationalism

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, nation-states closed borders. Borders divide – and intimate diff erence. In this article, I trace an emergent epidemiological nationalism which intimates a contagious other, taking ‘the’ border as my (unstable) object. While post-war and post-wall European projects celebrate dismantling borders, bordering continually becomes by saturating space with territoriality. Illustrating epidemiological nationalism’s intimately located here and there, I turn an ethnographic gaze to Wales: a nation yet not a state, with a border that cannot be closed. Through the socio-spatial saturate of the Welsh border’s enduring (non)existence run frictive, entangled intimacies. Meshing border studies with Lauren Berlant’s theorisation of intimacies, I show epidemiology’s conscription in imaginatively inscribing a safely state-like Welsh nation

A deep lead-coloured cloud: Smoke and Northern English space in the industrial novel

When Margaret Hale, heroine of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, first sights the distant smoke of a Northern English industrial town, she mistakes the ‘deep lead-coloured cloud’ for rain. Her confusion is pointed: industrial smoke was not of nature. Nor, indeed, was this the homely smoke of warm hearths. Industrial smoke was a disorienting and other atmosphere. It was also an atmosphere that featured prominently in emergent geographies of the North. For Charles Dickens, whose Hard Times was also published in 1854, the industrial North echoed fearful geographies of distant lands; smoke-stained brick was “red and black like the painted face of a savage”, and smoke itself made “monstrous serpents”. In this article, I explore the smoky atmospheres of Northern England in industrial-era novels. Visiting both Gaskell’s “Milton” and Dickens’ “Coketown” - which turn real places into archetypal industrial spaces - I show how industrial smoke’s striking materiality became at once definitive of Northern English space and redolent of socio-political change. And, I wonder how Milton and Coketown’s smoky geographies might still be with us

Fieldwork at Sunset:Visual representations of anthropology online

Most institutional anthropology departments have a website, to tout credentials, attract students, and offer information. These websites also take up the visual task of disciplinary representation, but their images have skipped the scrutiny that is necessary and overdue. This article analyzes online images of sociocultural anthropology across one hundred high-ranking universities worldwide. We show how, online, a discipline defined by diversity becomes readily reducible to “exotic” geographies and objectified “others.” While the urban serves as an unattractive foil, frequent images of children recall charity campaigns. Such visual tropes—which comprise a significant, public interface for anthropology—are not just awkwardly dated but also do disservice to ambitions for public anthropology. Change, we suggest, must begin at (the) home(page)

Rethinking lifestyle and middle-class migration in “left behind” regions

So-called “left behind” regions have gained infamy for working-class discontent. Yet a concurrent phenomenon has gone unremarked: middle-class lifestyles in peripheral places. This article examines how middle-class migrants (defined by economic, social, and cultural capital) to peripheral regions envisage and enact their aspirations. Against presumed migration trajectories to growing urban centres or for better-paid employment, we argue that seeming moves down the “escalator” reveal how inequalities between regions offer some migrants opportunities to enact middle-class lifestyles affordably. We present a qualitative case study of West Wales and the Valleys, predominantly rural and post-industrial and statistically among Europe's most deprived regions. Drawing from interviews with EU and UK in-migrants alongside long-term residents, we illustrate how three dimensions of quality of life—material, relational, subjective—are mobilised in middle-class placemaking amidst peripherality. We demonstrate how spatial inequalities and career trade-offs offer affordable material access to lifestyle and how middle-class aspirations enable migrants to subjectively transform peripherality into enchantment