Bordering seafarers at sea and onshore

This study uses a historically informed lens of coloniality, bordering, and intersectionality to analyze maritime bordering discourses and practices that target seafarers recruited from the Global South who embody the border in their everyday lives. In seeking to explain the current context exemplified by the sacking of P&O Ferry workers and the recruitment of “foreign agency” crews in March 2022, the study foregrounds 19th- and 20th-century maritime bordering legislation on ships and onshore, focusing on public-/private-bordering partnerships between governments, shipping companies, and unions. Archival research on British Indian seafarers employed by P&O a century ago and analysis of contemporary media and political discourses relating to “foreign agency crews” are drawn on to consider the implications of earlier bordering discourses and practices for 21st-century British citizenship and belonging. Attending to imperial bordering regulations that created the racialized and class-defined labor category of lascars explains the “common sense” designations of seafarers recruited in the Global South and their families as potential “illegal migrants,” and in doing so, it constitutes the long history of the public/private partnerships that constitute the UK's “hostile environment” immigration policies

Editorial: Why Free Speech?

Many of us struggle to make sense of what is without doubt a deepening global socio-economic and political crisis, and at the heart of this crisis lies an unprecedented and multi-directional assault on freedom of speech. But what is free speech? How should it be exercised and to what ends? These are more difficult questions to navigate in contexts of growing divisions in society, the crises of state governabilities, people’s governmentalities and disparities in power and wealth. Debates about freedom of speech are not new; however, the form they take now seems particularly vindictive and violent. Across the world, we are witness to disturbing moves to curtail free speech in liberal democracies and totalitarian states alike and among left wing as well as right wing movements. As recent events show, free speech is the first casualty of all forms of authoritarianism including religious fundamentalism. And from this flow a range of other crackdowns on civil society and serious human rights violations that cannot be challenged. This is why the debate on freedom of speech has become increasingly urgent

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

Part 2: Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Organisations

Four authors analyse Sue's impact on the discipline of anthropology and on the postgraduates she supervised. They highlight in particular her contributions as a teacher and her advocacy of what she terms ‘political reflexivity’

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

Everyday bordering, belonging and the reorientation of British Immigration legislation

The paper argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co‐existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border‐guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters