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

Migration, racism and the hostile environment: making the case for the social sciences

Brexit, the European immigration and refugee situation and the Grenfell and Windrush scandals are just some of the recent major events which issues of migration have been at the heart of British social and political agenda. These highlight racism and the fundamental relations people who have settled in the UK have to British collective identity and belonging as well as to the British economy, polity and social relations. 9.4 million UK residents are foreign-born, 14% of the population, just over a third of whom are EU-born. Less than 10% of UK residents are not UK nationals. 20% of the population is of an ethnicity other than White British. Social scientists have observed and analysed such public issues and the public policies that both framed and resulted from them throughout the years. In doing so they have not only helped to document and analyse them but contributed towards their critique and problematisation as part of a public intellectual endeavour towards a more equal and just society. In doing so, much of social sciences research has been empirically informed, often methodologically innovative, theoretically productive and has contributed to our understanding of how processes of racialization and migration have been experienced in diverse ways by different groupings. In this report we aim to highlight some of these contributions and their importance to British society and institutions. At the end of this report, we list, as Further Readings, some of the main contributions members of AcSS and other social scientists have made throughout the years in the field of migration and refugees, racism, and belonging. Rather than attempting to sum up these contributions in the report itself, however, we have selected some of the main issues in this field of study, which present particular challenges to contemporary British society and institutions. We focus in this report on the specific contributions of social sciences to these issues. British social science has been playing for many years an important, often leading, innovative conceptual role in international social science debates. Although the issues we study are presented within their historical and locational contexts, we focus in this report on present day issues which have been crucial to our areas of study, such as the development of a ‘hostile environment’ and everyday bordering as a major governmental technology in the control and disciplining of diversity and discourses on migrants and racialized minorities. We also examine how the issues we have been studying have been affected by the rise of extreme right and neo-nativist politics in the UK and the role of Brexit in these, as well as the ways different groups and social movements have been resisting these processes of exclusion and racialisation. In this report, we do not present British social sciences as unified and non-conflictual; nor do we see social sciences in the UK as isolated from professional or political developments in other countries and regions. In addition, the report is multi-disciplinary; it covers research from the fields of psychosocial studies, sociology, social policy, economics and politics. It stretches from the local, to the regional and the national. And it is consistentlyintersectional, addressing gender, class, generation, race, ethnicity and religion

Whiteness and loss in outer East London: tracing the collective memories of diaspora space

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place

White Memories, White Belonging: Competing Colonial Anniversaries in 'Postcolonial' East London

This paper explores how processes of remembering past events contribute to the construction of highly racialised local and national politics of belonging in the UK. Ethnographic research and contextualised discourse analysis are used to examine two colonial anniversaries remembered in 2006: the 1606 departure of English \'settlers\' who built the first permanent English colony in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, and the 1806 opening of the East India Docks, half a century after the East India Company took control of Bengal following the battle of Polashi. Both events were associated with the Thames waterfront location of Blackwall in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, an area with the highest Bengali population in Britain and significant links with North America through banks and businesses based at the regenerated Canary Wharf office complex. It investigates how discourses and events associated with these two specific anniversaries and with the recent \'regeneration\' of Blackwall, contribute to the consolidation of the dominant 'mercantile discourse\' about the British Empire, Britishness and belonging. Challenges to the dominant discourse of the \'celebration\' of colonial settlement in North America by competing discourses of North American Indian and African American groups are contrasted with the lack of contest to discourses that 'celebrate' Empire stories in contemporary Britain. The paper argues that the 'mercantile discourse' in Britain works to construct a sense of mutual white belonging that links white Englishness with white Americaness through emphasising links between Blackwall and Jamestown and associating the values of \'freedom and democracy\' with colonialism. At the same time British Bengali belonging is marginalised as links between Blackwall and Bengal and the violence and oppression of British colonialism are silenced. The paper concludes with an analysis of the contemporary mobilisation of the 'mercantile discourse' in influential social policy and 'regeneration' discourse about 'The East End'.Bengal, Bangladeshi, Bengali, East End, British Empire, Postcolonial, Whiteness, Belonging, Jamestown, East India Company

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

Bordering

Controlling national borders has once again become a key concern of contemporary states and a highly contentious issue in social and political life. But controlling borders is about much more than patrolling territorial boundaries at the edges of states: it now comprises a multitude of practices and processes taking place at different levels, some spatial and some virtual, some at the edges of states and some in the local contexts of everyday life – in workplaces, in hospitals, in schools – which, taken together, construct, reproduce and contest borders and the rights and obligations associated with belonging to a nation-state. Based on original research, this book is a systematic exploration of the practices and processes that now define state bordering and the role it plays in national and global governance. The authors show that many ordinary citizens are required by states to carry out border guarding activities in their daily interactions with others. These include truck drivers and airline staff evicting people seeking to cross state borders as well as employers, landlords and public service administrators filtering people within territories. The uncertainties arising from these processes mean that more and more people around the world find themselves living in grey zones, excluded from any form of protection and often denied basic human rights. This richly documented account of how bordering has become dispersed into the interstices of everyday life, impinging on some individuals much more than on others, will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, politics and geography and to anyone concerned with the changing character of governance and belonging today