Blood, body and belonging: the geographies of halal food consumption in the UK

This article presents a framework for understanding how ‘halal’ food consumption is understood, practiced and experienced by British Muslims through an empirical study in Birmingham (UK). There are emerging bodies of literature in geography that analyse food/animal ethics and work recognising the increasing importance of the halal food industry. However, there is also a need to understand how ethical and theological concerns translate when scaled down to individual food choices and experiences of Muslims, as they negotiate food consumption as a minority group. Accordingly, this paper utilises qualitative data from an in-depth study to develop a framework for understanding halal food consumption from the perspective of British Muslims. Utilising conceptual literature on food/animal ethics, abjection and belonging it draws evidence into three corresponding sections: (i) Blood–the ethics of religious slaughter processes; (ii) Body–the embodied responses to ‘clean’ and ‘impure’ food, and (iii) Belonging–integral connections between halal food and notions of belonging. The paper concludes by suggesting that this framework is a helpful starting point from which to understand the ways in which halal food consumption scales down from abstraction to practice, from ethics to embodied experience

Channel crossings: offshoring asylum and the afterlife of empire in the Dover Strait

In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of state responses to irregular Channel crossings. This article begins to address this gap, situating contemporary British responses to irregular Channel crossers within the context of colonial histories and maritime legacies. We focus particularly on the enduring appeal of “the offshore” as a place where undesirable racialized populations can be placed. Our aim is to offer a historicized perspective on this phenomenon which seeks to respond to calls to embed colonial histories in analyses of the present

Small boats, big contracts: extracting value from the UK's post‐Brexit asylum ‘crisis’

This article discusses post-Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel crossings, and how private actors have sought to profit from people seeking asylum within this policy regime. These interrelated political and financial interests are pursued irrespective of the fact that none of the policies being advanced will ‘stop the boats’

It’s not about security, it’s about racism : counter-terror strategies, civilizing processes and the post-race fiction

Using a range of international examples, this article examines the ways in which members of the black and minority ethnic population continue to be viewed as problematic and deviant, challenging the claim that we are now living in a post-race state. The article considers how race and racism are still in reality, used to socially order society—and specifically criminalize those black and minority ethnic groups of (real or perceived) Muslim background—what I call “brown bodies”. Turning its focus to the United Kingdom, although offering an analysis applicable to other countries with similar racialized conditions, the article discusses how sub-measures under current counter-terror discourse not only serve to control and regulate Muslim populations, but more so, the civilizing undertone of its Western (or, British) values and national security narrative continue to normalize and perpetuate antiMuslim sentiment and construct Muslims as “suspect” communities at every possible opportunity. This process draws on a “post-colonial fantasy” and re-uses established practices of “race-consumption” to control brown bodies. This ensures that anti-Muslim racism remains a key feature of contemporary British society. The article ends noting its support for that body of literature that critiques the claim that we are now living in a post-race state. This article is published as part of a collection on racism in counter-terrorism and surveillance discourse

‘Bringing order to the border’: liberal and illiberal fantasies of border control in the English channel

This article focuses on the advancement of fantasy policy solutions to irregular migration, drawing on the case study of the UK/French border. In 2018 people began to cross the English Channel in significant numbers to seek asylum. This led to much commentary and a raft of new legislation seeking to criminalise people crossing the Channel and end rights to seek asylum in the UK. In this article, we explore the interaction between two sets of fantasies that are advanced by politicians and mainstream political parties in the UK. That is: the liberal technocratic fantasy–that this phenomenon can be efficiently ‘fixed’ through interventions in policing and multilateral cooperation with neighbouring EU states; and the illiberal fantasy that extreme and performative punishments can solve it. These fantasies intersect and break at different points in time, and involve many of the same policy solutions which are represented in different terms. Importantly, both of these fantasies reproduce racialised and colonial logics and ultimately serve border imperialism

Unequal Europe, unequal Brexit: How intra-European inequalities shape the unfolding and framing of Brexit

This article argues that focusing on intra-European inequalities is key to a deeper understanding of the Brexit process, as the impacts of the Brexit process on core–periphery inequalities within Europe and on intra-European migrations remain under-researched topics. Focusing on sociology, this article provides a critical analysis of the burgeoning literature on Brexit, highlighting the centrality of methodological nationalism and its critique by critical race scholars. We expand the latter’s critique, providing a different solution to the national framing of the debate. Drawing on world-system theory and post-Bourdieusian social theory, we explore the role that Britain played in legitimising core–periphery inequalities in Europe and social hierarchies between West and East, and North and South, European populations. We highlight the UK’s influence over EU supranational policies and its association, among non-UK EU citizens, with a ‘meritocracy narrative’ that shapes patterns and meanings of intra-European migration. We further explore how inequalities of nation, class, race and gender make EU citizens unequally positioned to access the promises of this narrative. Overall, we argue that a focus on intra-European inequalities is essential to an understanding of how Britain contributed to the unequal Europe it aims to leave, and how EU citizens’ unequal migrations make Brexit an asymmetrical process