Housing, the hyper-precarization of asylum seekers and the contested politics of welcome on Tyneside

This paper analyses the role of housing in shaping the contested politics of welcome in the North East of England. It argues that changes to state provision of asylum seeker housing and the introduction of new legislation to create a hostile internalised bordering regime have led to a hyper-precarization of asylum seekers, which has been contested through a range of political projects at the urban scale. On Tyneside, these projects coalesced around struggles for improvements to state-provided accommodation for asylum seekers. The analysis reveals that whilst asylum housing has become key to the articulation of the politics of welcome within cities outside of London, it is spatially and temporally differentiated. The differential political projects shaping ‘welcoming’ at the urban scale emerge from contestation between a range of actors. On Tyneside, this contested politics arises from two key shifts: a change in national and local government in 2010 and 2011, which catalysed an oppositional politics of welcome amongst regional politicians; and the emergence of a new civil society initiative on Tyneside, whose direct action destabilised the relatively sedimented existing political landscape of welcome in the region, making space for differentiated asylum seeker political subjectivities

Bringing the Frame Into Focus: How Cable News Pundits Protect the Glass Ceiling

In many nations, the 21st century has been about women in politics. Not only are they running for prominent political offices, but they are winning them. The trend toward success for American female politicians has been slower to progress, however, as no women have been elected to the U.S. Presidency to date, and social science research suggests persistent gender biases exist in their news coverage. In order to explore the potential role that media play in continuing this gender disparity in U.S. politics, this comparative study investigates how cable pundit programs – a dramatic, partisan genre of “news” that has risen in popularity since the 2008 election – frame female candidates for the highest national office. A content analysis of pre-election coverage of three prominent U.S. politicians on the national scene, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, on The O’Reilly Factor, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show reveals a small incidence of gendered coverage across these shows overall. Among said coverage found, however, trends in the data suggest that conservative programs employ more gendered frames than liberal programs, and that those frames are particularly negative when referring to liberal candidates (Clinton), and positive when referring to conservative (Palin and Bachmann) candidates. Further, the gender of the pundits, the gender of the cable network production staff members, and the political party affiliations of executive staff/owners correspond to the frames employed by these programs in unique ways

The informal economies of the Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands

The aim of this thesis is to explore the informal economies of post socialism as they are practiced in two rural communities on either side of the Ukrainian-Romanian border, which are now dependent on migrant worker remittances, cross-border small trading and consumption and a wide range of non-market economic practices for not only daily but also long-term survival or social reproduction. As informal economic practices have been sustained and even proliferated in the region, the thesis responds to a need to understand how local communities produce, embed and give meaning to these everyday, routinised practices in the borderlands. The thesis therefore addresses two key questions: How are informal economies in the Ukrainian-Romanian borderlands practiced?; How do communities construct and embed meanings for these practices? The themes of language, citizenship, gender and marriage enable us to understand the processes through which the practices are discursively and performatively given meaning

Intersectional Border(ing)s

This special issue of Political Geography marks a contribution to the fields of feminist geopolitics and border studies by bringing together a series of papers, which use approaches based on Yuval-Davis’ ‘situated intersectionality’ (2015) to explore everyday bordering within and without contemporary Europe. The special issue is comprised of work undertaken by colleagues from across Europe and beyond as part of work package 9 ‘Borders, Intersectionality and the Everyday’ of the EUBorderscapes project (2012-2016). We term our approach to studying borders, borderscapes and bordering processes as ‘situated intersectional bordering’. The main contribution of this approach is that borders and borderings are understood as dialogical constructs and that if we are to understand how they are being made and re-made we must attempt to explore them through the situated gazes of differentially positioned social actors. We therefore suggest a holistic approach to understanding border(ing)s, which is embedded in everyday life. Through the study of the multi-layered complexities of everyday borderings we can ‘approach the truth’ (Hill-Collins, 1990)

‘People think that Romanians and Roma are the same’: everyday bordering and the lifting of transitional controls

On 1 January 2014 the transitional controls on free movement adopted by the UK when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, ended. This paper demonstrates how the discourses of politicians relating to their removal, amplified via news media contributed to the extension of state bordering practices further into everyday life. Based on ethnographic research into everyday bordering during 2013-2015 the paper uses an intersectional framework to explore how this homogenizing, bordering discourse was experienced and contested from differently situated perspectives of Roma and non--Roma social actors from established communities

Bordering and Disordering in the National Health Service

Recent immigration legislation in the UK has extended the internal reach of the UK’s border. The intensification of everyday bordering has introduced immigration checks into more and more everyday encounters and required more UK residents than ever before to check the immigration status of others (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss & Cassidy, 2019). In this paper, I begin by exploring what this shift has meant for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and healthcare workers, arguing that it has disordered the delivery of healthcare services. I then move on to demonstrate that the advent of everyday bordering has also, however, opened up new spaces to resist and disorder processes and practices of bordering, as well as illustrating why health care has become a key site for the disordering of everyday bordering amongst a wide range of actors. In particular, I explore how the campaigning work of migrant support organisations and other groups intersects with mundane practices of everyday resistance by workers within the NHS itself

Changing the racialized ‘common sense’ of everyday bordering

The out-sourcing of border-guarding is not (just) going to paid expert agencies but is imposed as part of the unpaid daily citizenship duties of untrained people in Britain

Animal roles and traces in the history of medicine, c1880-1980

This paper argues for the need to create a more animal-centred history of medicine, in which animals are considered not simply as the backdrop for human history, but as medical subjects important in and of themselves. Drawing on the tools and approaches of animal and human–animal studies, it seeks to demonstrate, via four short historical vignettes, how investigations into the ways that animals shaped and were shaped by medicine enables us to reach new historical understandings of both animals and medicine, and of the relationships between them. This is achieved by turning away from the much-studied fields of experimental medicine and public health, to address four historically neglected contexts in which diseased animals played important roles: zoology/pathology, parasitology/epidemiology, ethology/ psychiatry, and wildlife/veterinary medicine. Focusing, in turn, on species that rarely feature in the history of medicine – big cats, tapeworms, marsupials and mustelids – which were studied, respectively, within the zoo, the psychiatric hospital, human–animal communities and the countryside, we reconstruct the histories of these animals using the traces that they left on the medical-historical record

The Role of Caspase-7 during Infection with Listeria monocytogenes and during Intoxication with Listeriolysin O.

The mammalian plasma membrane is a critical barrier that guards the integrity and function of the cell. Damage to this lipid bilayer commonly occurs during infection by microbial pathogens, many of which encode pore-forming toxins (PFT). Host cells are resilient to damage by physiological levels of PFT, but the molecular mechanisms that govern adaptation to membrane damage are poorly characterized. We found that a host cysteine protease, caspase-7, is activated during infection with the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, and that activation was attributable to bacterial expression of the pore-forming toxin listeriolysin O (LLO). Exogenous treatment of cells with purified LLO induced membrane-damage-dependent transient activation of caspase-7. Transient activation correlated with rapid resolution of membrane damage and improved survival comparing wild type and caspase-7 deficient cells. Caspase-7 deficiency resulted in decreased membrane blebbing in response to toxin treatment, implicating blebbing as one possible mechanism by which host cells maintain membrane integrity and survival upon intoxication. Caspase-7 deficient cells also displayed less aggregation of Annexin A1, a calcium sensor that acts as a plug to sequester the cell cytosol from the membrane lesion, which may contribute to the inability of these cells to heal. The process of cellular blebbing is observed in both apoptotic and non-apoptotic contexts and relies on complex regulation of the actinomyosin network. We found that inhibition of Rho kinases or myosin II, key regulators of the cortical cytoskeleton, also inhibited blebbing and membrane repair in response to toxin treatment, largely mimicking the phenotype of caspase-7 deficient macrophages. Thus, we have uncovered a novel mechanism of membrane repair that relies on proteins originally implicated in the execution of programmed cell death, caspase-7, ROCK, and myosin II. We propose that the dualistic functions of these proteins are due in part to signal strength; low-level damage or activation promotes survival whereas high-level activation leads to apoptosis. In this way, contextual signals allow cells to repurpose existing machinery that would otherwise stimulate apoptosis, to promote blebbing and survival after damage by pore-forming toxins.PhDMicrobiology & ImmunologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99992/1/skbc_1.pd

Debordering and everyday (re)bordering in and of Dover: Post-borderland borderscapes

In this paper, we argue that traditional borderlands have undergone a rapid transformation in recent decades, as a result of multiscalar de- and rebordering processes. We draw on recent insights from critical border studies to re-examine one of its historical sites of research, Dover in South East England. In doing so, we seek to elucidate what happens in border towns, when de- and re-bordering processes effectively displace key aspects of the border elsewhere. We argue that this shift is critical not only due to the decline of economic opportunities and ties to the border, but also because these necessitate new narratives and understandings or imaginaries amongst borderlanders. Whilst all elements of the border have not been dispersed, many have materially ‘moved’ elsewhere. We posit that Dover, like other border settlements, has become a post-borderland borderscape, where we can see evidence of everyday bordering processes similar to those elsewhere in the UK and use a situated, intersectional framework to illustrate the impact that differential social positionings have upon experiences of and perspectives on de-and-reborderings