The Politics of Exhaustion: Immigration Control in the British-French Border Zone

Within a climate of growing anti-immigration and populist forces gaining traction across Europe, and in response to the increased number of prospective asylum seekers arriving in Europe, recent years have seen the continued hardening of borders and a disconcerting evolution of new forms of immigration control measures utilised by states. Based on extensive field research carried out amongst displaced people in Europe in 2016-2019, this article highlights the way in which individuals in northern France are finding themselves trapped in a violent border zone, unable to move forward whilst having no obvious alternative way out of their predicament. The article seeks to illustrate the violent dynamics inherent in the immigration control measures in this border zone, characterised by both direct physical violence as well as banalised and structural forms of violence, including state neglect through the denial of services and care. The author suggests that the raft of violent measures and micro practices authorities resort to in the French-British border zone could be understood as constituting one of the latest tools for European border control and obstruction of the access to asylum procedures; a Politics of Exhaustion

The Politics of Exhaustion and Migrant Subjectivities: Researching border struggles in northern France in 2016-2019

Situated within critical border and migration studies, this thesis is a detailed ethnographic account of the ‘border struggles’ associated with the UK-France borderzone in northern France, where human mobilities meet state endeavours to control and regain a hold over migratory movement. Through an ‘embodied encounter,’ which draws on the voices and experiences of 75 migrant interlocutors and other interviewees with first-hand experience of the UK-France borderzone, the thesis generates a unique, in-depth understanding of how migration governance operates at the UK-France border. It is argued that the juxtaposed border arrangements between the UK and France have not merely led to the re-localisation of the UK’s physical border controls to an extraterritorial space; the ‘border’ has also entered into spaces of migrants’ everyday life in the borderzone. Traditional spatial interdictions and restrictions emerging from non-entrée policies, reliant on tactics such as confinement, bordering fences, and deportation, have been successively complemented by more insidious, temporal, and corporeal biopolitical technologies of bordering. The latter consists of an array of tactics devised to render life governable and pliant, and bodies docile, with the premeditated intention to negate one’s personal autonomy, agency, wellbeing, and self-efficacy. This ‘politics of exhaustion’ thus seeks to curb autonomous migratory movements, influence decisions, and manage intent through the physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion of its subjects. In this sense, exhaustion is understood as constitutive of bordering processes, as well as of the ‘border’ itself, but cannot be grasped within the biopolitical ‘making live/letting die’ dichotomy. Thus, the thesis makes a significant contribution to advancing scholarly work which challenges this binary. Moreover, rather than privileging an understanding power that is totalising, the thesis subsequently shifts its focus onto the heterogeneity of ways in which migrants respond to, and shape, through their ability and desires to move, the apparatuses of power, and the technologies of the politics of exhaustion. As such, the thesis allows for a gaze into the possibilities of articulating new subjectivities within borderzones characterised by stringent state control and biopolitical techniques, opening powerful ways to think of spaces for resistance, alternative subjectivities, and the performance of political belonging outside traditional notions of citizenship. In doing so, the thesis mobilises a heterogenisation of the ‘border’, advancing scholarly work which understands the interlinkages between power and subjectivities as processual, ambivalent, and interwoven. Lastly, given the brutality of the politics of exhaustion and its harmful impact upon the bodies and minds of racialised migrants, the thesis reverts back to this concept once more, arguing that a displacement of responsibility from state authorities onto the bodies and minds of migrants serves to depoliticise suffering. This, in combination with the partial absence, or invisibility, of clearly defined and identifiable ‘human culprits’ in the implementation of the politics of exhaustion, may give an illusion of an absence of intention to cause harm, thus sanitising and invisibilising violence whilst also producing an aura of legitimacy. The thesis thus contributes to an ongoing ontological shift within critical border and migration scholarship, by emphasising ways in which violence is constitutive of bordering technologies; something that has only intermittently figured within traditional migration studies to-date

Study of loss in superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators

Superconducting coplanar waveguide (SCPW) resonators have a wide range of applications due to the combination of their planar geometry and high quality factors relative to normal metals. However, their performance is sensitive to both the details of their geometry and the materials and processes that are used in their fabrication. In this paper, we study the dependence of SCPW resonator performance on materials and geometry as a function of temperature and excitation power. We measure quality factors greater than $2\times10^6$ at high excitation power and $6\times10^5$ at a power comparable to that generated by a single microwave photon circulating in the resonator. We examine the limits to the high excitation power performance of the resonators and find it to be consistent with a model of radiation loss. We further observe that while in all cases the quality factors are degraded as the temperature and power are reduced due to dielectric loss, the size of this effect is dependent on resonator materials and geometry. Finally, we demonstrate that the dielectric loss can be controlled in principle using a separate excitation near the resonance frequencies of the resonator.Comment: Replacing original version. Changes made based on referee comments. Fixed typo in equation (3) and added appendi

Uniform shear flow in dissipative gases. Computer simulations of inelastic hard spheres and (frictional) elastic hard spheres

In the preceding paper (cond-mat/0405252), we have conjectured that the main transport properties of a dilute gas of inelastic hard spheres (IHS) can be satisfactorily captured by an equivalent gas of elastic hard spheres (EHS), provided that the latter are under the action of an effective drag force and their collision rate is reduced by a factor $(1+\alpha)/2$ (where $\alpha$ is the constant coefficient of normal restitution). In this paper we test the above expectation in a paradigmatic nonequilibrium state, namely the simple or uniform shear flow, by performing Monte Carlo computer simulations of the Boltzmann equation for both classes of dissipative gases with a dissipation range $0.5\leq \alpha\leq 0.95$ and two values of the imposed shear rate $a$. The distortion of the steady-state velocity distribution from the local equilibrium state is measured by the shear stress, the normal stress differences, the cooling rate, the fourth and sixth cumulants, and the shape of the distribution itself. In particular, the simulation results seem to be consistent with an exponential overpopulation of the high-velocity tail. The EHS results are in general hardly distinguishable from the IHS ones if $\alpha\gtrsim 0.7$, so that the distinct signature of the IHS gas (higher anisotropy and overpopulation) only manifests itself at relatively high dissipationsComment: 23 pages; 18 figures; Figs. 2 and 9 include new simulations; two new figures added; few minor changes; accepted for publication in PR

A continuum model of gas flows with localized density variations

We discuss the kinetic representation of gases and the derivation of macroscopic equations governing the thermomechanical behavior of a dilute gas viewed at the macroscopic level as a continuous medium. We introduce an approach to kinetic theory where spatial distributions of the molecules are incorporated through a mean-free-volume argument. The new kinetic equation derived contains an extra term involving the evolution of this volume, which we attribute to changes in the thermodynamic properties of the medium. Our kinetic equation leads to a macroscopic set of continuum equations in which the gradients of thermodynamic properties, in particular density gradients, impact on diffusive fluxes. New transport terms bearing both convective and diffusive natures arise and are interpreted as purely macroscopic expansion or compression. Our new model is useful for describing gas flows that display non-local-thermodynamic-equilibrium (rarefied gas flows), flows with relatively large variations of macroscopic properties, and/or highly compressible fluid flows

Knudsen Effect in a Nonequilibrium Gas

From the molecular dynamics simulation of a system of hard-core disks in which an equilibrium cell is connected with a nonequilibrium cell, it is confirmed that the pressure difference between two cells depends on the direction of the heat flux. From the boundary layer analysis, the velocity distribution function in the boundary layer is obtained. The agreement between the theoretical result and the numerical result is fairly good.Comment: 4pages, 4figure

Life and Operating Range Extension of the BPT-4000 Qualification Model Hall Thruster

Following completion of the 5,600 hr qualification life test of the BPT-4000 4.5 kW Hall Thruster Propulsion System, NASA and Aerojet have undertaken efforts to extend the qualified operating range and lifetime of the thruster to support a wider range of NASA missions. The system was originally designed for orbit raising and stationkeeping applications on military and commercial geostationary satellites. As such, it was designed to operate over a range of power levels from 3 to 4.5 kW. Studies of robotic exploration applications have shown that the cost savings provided by utilizing commercial technology that can operate over a wider range of power levels provides significant mission benefits. The testing reported on here shows that the 4.5 kW thruster as designed has the capability to operate efficiently down to power levels as low as 1 kW. At the time of writing, the BPT-4000 qualification thruster and cathode have accumulated over 400 hr of operation between 1 to 2 kW with an additional 600 hr currently planned. The thruster has demonstrated no issues with longer duration operation at low power

T-cell intracellular antigens in health and disease

T-cell intracellular antigen 1 (TIA1) and TIA1-related/like protein (TIAR/TIAL1) are 2 proteins discovered in 1991 as components of cytotoxic T lymphocyte granules. They act in the nucleus as regulators of transcription and pre-mRNA splicing. In the cytoplasm, TIA1 and TIAR regulate and/or modulate the location, stability and/or translation of mRNAs. As knowledge of the different genes regulated by these proteins and the cellular/biological programs in which they are involved increases, it is evident that these antigens are key players in human physiology and pathology. This review will discuss the latest developments in the field, with physiopathological relevance, that point to novel roles for these regulators in the molecular and cell biology of higher eukaryotes.Ministry Economic Affairs and Competitiveness through FEDER funds (BFU2008–00354, BFU2011–29653 and BFU2014–57735-R). The CBMSO receives an institutional grant from Fundación Ramón Areces.Peer Reviewe