Borderland Infrastructures

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.

Looking out at Fort Vert nature reserve from a bird hide, Calais, April 2024 (image: Emma Newcombe)

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