In 2023 and 2024 MMB organised fieldtrips to Calais and Dover with colleagues from Bristol and the US to explore the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in these port cities. The trips led to a series of MMB blogposts, which we will continue to add to over time – see below.
MMB interview on Radio 4 at Fort Vert
On the second fieldtrip MMB Director Bridget Anderson and Senior Research Associate Travis Van Isacker were recorded for BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts walking around the Fort Vert nature reserve, created on the site of the destroyed migrant ‘Jungle’ camp on the edge of Calais. Here, in ‘The Invisible‘ episode, you can hear them discuss how this area was transformed as part of a UK-French border policing operation from a place where migrants once camped into a nature reserve hospitable only for plants, animals and migratory birds.
Digitised borders
MMB colleagues are also carrying out research on the UK/French border at Dover and Calais as part of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol. We tend to imagine borders as physical objects—walls, barbed wire, features of the landscape like The Channel, an officer in a booth. But today’s borders are digitised. States promise future borders that are ‘efficient, smart, and responsive’ thanks to biometrics, facial recognition software and fully digital records of immigration status. But as sociodigital technologies, whose futures are they playing out?
Read more about their ‘Digitised borders’ work theme here.
Blog posts
- Footsore/footloose: mobile foot technologiesBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Radhika Subramaniam. It was the boots that first caught my eye. They sat there, two or three, on a large table, looking in good nick, creased into a visible sense of… Read more: Footsore/footloose: mobile foot technologies
- Transnational borders: from containment to freedomBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Miriam Ticktin. Borders as infrastructure As I looked out the car window in Calais at the enormous white mesh razor-wire lined fences, the surveillance towers and the starkness of the… Read more: Transnational borders: from containment to freedom
- Borderscapes: policing withinBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Victoria Hattam. Governments around the globe have been building border walls for decades: Calais is no exception. At least since the Touquet Treaty, the UK government has helped fund the… Read more: Borderscapes: policing within
- Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlandsBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Juan Zhang. At the Dover border crossing I sat in the backseat in silence waiting for questions from the immigration officer inspecting the four passports we handed over together as… Read more: Time and (im)mobility in Calais’ borderlands
- Notes from a visit to CalaisBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Nariman Massoumi. Nariman Massoumi is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge Representation, Belonging,… Read more: Notes from a visit to Calais
- Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in CalaisBorderland Infrastructures – an MMB special series exploring the material and symbolic infrastructure of border regimes in the port cities of Calais and Dover. By Bridget Anderson. As we walked around Calais, one of the group remarked ‘It’s just like The City & the City!’ She was spot on. In his novel The City &… Read more: Breaching two worlds: seeing through borders in Calais