Category: Blog

Footsore/footloose: mobile foot technologies

Posted on by Emily

Borderland 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 comfort. Whether they were on view as available options or whether they had been tried on earlier that day wasn’t clear. The afternoon meal and distribution were done and people had dispersed. All around the table were crates, each labelled by size, piled with pairs of shoes, their laces knotting them together.

The boots were in the ‘warehouse’. Everyone called it that in English, and it was hard to know what to expect as we drove through quiet Calais streets lined with rocks, the ubiquitous ‘borderscaping’ to which Victoria Hattam has drawn attention. But warehouse it really was, a cavernous shed located on a side street, impeccably organized with every kind of personal gear. Clothes and shoes, children’s toys, electrical gear as well as sleeping bags, blankets, tents and logs were stacked in well demarcated zones. The stated purpose of L’Auberge des Migrants, which operates the facility in partnership with several other migrant support initiatives, is to be a logistical and humanitarian platform for people in exile, providing material support and advocacy. The warehouse (‘entrepôt’ in French on their website) in Calais is both a distribution centre for materials as well as for tinned food, hot meals and conversation.

Walking boots in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

I have been thinking a lot about feet of late, how their agency and mobility have been sedentarized into weighty, leaden traces to which the metaphors of carbon footprints, digital footprints and building footprints testify. But feet are meant to wander, making shoes a quintessential mobile technology. Foot coverings not only make it possible to go farther and faster; their lack can substantially hinder movement, especially in a world unfriendly to the bare foot. Even as shod feet are a mark of urbanity and civilization, unshod feet can come to signify poverty, unworldliness, even mental illness. For those who want to be on the move, who must travel atop variable surfaces, in different seasons, there are few needs more important than footwear. Those on the road who come to the warehouse look for boots, sneakers or trainers, and shower slippers.

Emptied personal belongings have a powerful charge. Artists and anthropologists have explored personal and political issues through the material artifacts of forced and voluntary migration – as, for instance, Ai Wei Wei’s public installations with orange life jackets or anthropologist Jason De Leon’s collections of backpacks, water bottles and photographs as part of the Undocumented Migration Project. Piles of shoes are some of the most gripping memorials of the Holocaust exhibited in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Auschwitz. Imprinted with the residue of the person, they are also a reminder of a life’s extinguishment. In the warehouse, although the boots had been worn, they still looked purposeful.

Boots and shoes stored in the L’Auberge des Migrants warehouse, Calais, April 2024 (photo: author’s own)

Provisioning is not the only way shoes insert themselves into the cross-currents of migration politics. In 2005, Argentinean artist Judi Werthein premiered a project called Brinco as part of inSite, an organization that produced collaborative artistic projects and public interventions in the San Diego–Tijuana region of the U.S. –Mexico borderlands. Werthein launched a pair of sneakers under the trademark Brinco (Jump) to expose the differential policies and contradictions that impact and control international borders, labour and migration. The sneakers were outfitted with a mini-compass, a flashlight, insoles that doubled as a map indicating the best crossing points and alerting people to treacherous terrain, the image of a saint of migrants and a pocket for money or painkillers. In Tijuana, Werthein distributed the sneakers for free to migrants intending to cross the border, while on the U.S. side they were sold in an exclusive boutique as a limited-edition art object. She had the sneakers manufactured in China to underscore how the transnational movement of cheap goods and commodities works in direct opposition to the regulations and barriers to the movement of people. The project sparked controversy and personal threats to the artist, opposed by those who felt she was aiding and abetting illegal immigration.

In June 2018, Oxfam released a briefing paper Nowhere But Out about the failure of the French and Italian authorities to help refugees and migrants stranded in the Italian town of Ventimiglia. France had re-established border controls in 2015, effectively suspending the free movement guaranteed between Schengen states. Many of those who crossed the border into France were being returned to Italy. The report accused the French border police of forms of callous violence, such as confiscating mobile phones and SIM cards and forcing people to return on foot. The report also quoted the Oxfam Open Europe project leader, Chiara Romagna, who said, ‘Some children even had the soles of their shoes cut off, before being sent back to Italy.’ Of course, evoking the child victim is a humanitarian trope that draws on what Miriam Ticktin identifies as the innocence they embody. Still, surely some children could be carried, shoes or not. Even as routine border violence goes, cutting off the soles of shoes is inept and strangely spiteful. Why target shoes?

These boots are made for walkin’, as the song goes. Tents and backpacks might be as snail shells, the homes we carry, but shoes are emphatically not houses for feet. To the footloose and footsore alike, they kick at the heels and in so doing, they seem to kick up enough dust to strike a political nerve. There is more symbolic heft knotted into those laced boots than we imagine – and a resolute and relentless drive to movement in every ordinary pair of feet.

Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships. Her book, Footprint: Four Itineraries, is forthcoming in 2025.

New questions for the UK’s seasonal worker scheme

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Lydia Medland.

The pen asks: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ It’s a freebie from a horticultural event aimed at fruit growers. The expected answer is, ‘yes’. On the other side of the pen is the name of an agency that sponsors workers to come to the UK. Where will the workers come from? Neither agent nor grower is expected to care. How will they be recruited? The agency is one of seven licensed operators (six of which recruit for horticulture) legally permitted to sponsor migrant workers for work in UK fields, polytunnels, glasshouses and packhouses.

Promotional pen from a horticultural trade show, 2023 (photo by Lydia Medland)

This Seasonal Worker Visa (SWV) is the post-Brexit scheme to fill the horticultural labour market shortage that occurred after many EU nationals stopped coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit. This had followed a period where no visa scheme was in place (2014-2018) when the UK relied entirely on EU nationals via EU Freedom of Movement. Nevertheless, an earlier scheme, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS), dated back, in mostly low numbers, to the post-war era.

Under the current scheme, seasonal workers are restricted to a six month stay in the UK. If workers are unhappy with the farm on which they are ‘placed’, they may request a transfer. Transfers are not guaranteed. When workers are dismissed for any reason (including for working slower than the firm considers normal) they risk being sent home early. The scheme does not permit workers access to public funds or to bring family members. The SWV ties workers to a single employer meaning that vulnerabilities to risks of labour exploitation, debt and other serious challenges are tangible.

One of the big differences between SWV and SAWS is that the new scheme has a global reach meaning seasonal workers are now very nationally diverse. This raises important questions that have not filtered through to public debate:

1. How can workers from a wide range of very different countries be supported?

According to Home Office statistics, in 2022, workers of 62 nationalities came to the UK on temporary visas to do seasonal agricultural work. Such a range of people from different contexts and backgrounds brings an expanding range of needs. Some growers are attempting to respond to needs by, for example, offering prayer rooms. However, other requirements such as linguistic diversity are more difficult to accommodate, particularly in isolated rural locations.

Crucially, lack of effective communication can make it difficult for people to know their labour rights. For example, the retailer-funded Just Good Work App aimed at seasonal workers conveys information about working rights in the UK. However, I found it defaulted to a choice of English or Russian after the registration pages. This is a signal that something as simple as an app is not enough to enable communication between workers, their employers (growers) and intermediaries. Workers often feel pressure from supervisors when they have their hands full with tasks; this is not a context where they can easily use translation apps without losing time and missing targets. The question of how to support the linguistic diversity of workers cannot then be reduced to a smartphone application.

2. Does the distance that seasonal workers travel matter?

The research around the debts accrued by seasonal workers to fund their travel and time in the UK has found distance has important consequences. Workers responsible for paying their own air fares incur high transport costs when they travel long distances. There is currently movement towards an employer pays principle, which would shift the cost of the workers’ visas and flights to the grower. But one of the reasons for the demand for seasonal migrant workers is that growers suffer from the low prices that they receive from retailers (mostly supermarkets). Shifting further costs onto growers may add to this problem. I would like to see the introduction of a retailer pays principle, where costs are carried by supermarkets who receive the highest added value from the fruit and veg they sell. Worker groups are now calling for this.

Moreover, in the context of climate change, we should consider the ecological impacts of a scheme which is global in reach and encourages regular short-term movement of people to the UK and home again. Short-termism is written into the scheme because there is no route to settlement for workers. The practice of recruitment of workers from within Europe not only meant that workers recruited had more rights within the labour market (before Brexit), making them less at risk of exploitation than current visa workers, but it led to a lower carbon footprint for the sector. Regularly flying workers around the world to produce ‘local fruit’ is a contradiction with an environmental cost.

3. Can recruiters be more aware and engaged with contexts of origin?

The SWV has had some early problems. These included the discovery by policy makers, thanks to NGO and journalist research, that many workers from Nepal and Indonesia were paying brokers large sums of money in order to gain access to the scheme, and subsequently accruing large debts to work. The UK government responded to this by revoking a license from one of the scheme operators, and suspending another. In the wake of reports documenting worker indebtedness and labour exploitation, the UK’s Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, arranged bilateral meetings and a signing of agreements on information-sharing and worker protection with the governments of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in May 2023, two major countries of origin for SWV workers.

These responses to problems are reactive, framed as exceptions to a norm. The system is designed for prospective workers anywhere in the world to apply with an email. While on the face of it this is ‘open access’, for those with no English or prior knowledge of the UK or its government, using an intermediary is a logical thing to do. It is therefore no surprise that workers use brokers, especially in countries (for example, Indonesia) where the use of brokers is common and well-documented in academic research. These events are part of a context-blindness in which few efforts are made to understand the situations of prospective workers approaching the system from outside the UK labour market. In aiming to reach workers ‘globally’, the SWV system obliges potential migrantised workers to do all the cultural and linguistic work, and face all the risks of having their contexts, languages and needs little understood.

Not all seasonal migration programmes work this way. Canada, France and Spain use bilateral agreements that give both states of origin and destination responsibilities to temporary seasonal workers. Canada’s scheme is open to citizens of 12 countries (from Mexico and the Caribbean). Spain and France are subject to the EU Seasonal Workers Directive and have bilateral agreements to govern specific relationships. Spain’s system involves seven countries; France’s relevant bilateral agreements cover 19 countries. The UK’s open market approach is subcontracted through labour agents so bilateral arrangements including safeguards for workers rarely occur.

My pen keeps asking its question: ‘Need seasonal workers?’ The world does need seasonal workers. Harvests are seasonal, our food is seasonal, and we need our food. However, do seasonal workers need to be pro-actively recruited from a global rural labour force? I am not sure. Reports continue to emphasise needs for reform, particularly removing the tied nature of visas and allowing workers to access public services. Is this enough? Building a workforce requires continuity, reliability, exchange, connection, understanding and the development of skills. A better way of building such connections needed in the SWV could also include better linguistic support, verified intermediaries who are not sponsors, and a systematic role for trade unions to facilitate freedom of association as one of the core labour standards, so easily overlooked in the market-orientated UK context.

Lydia Medland is a Research Fellow in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She is currently the Principal Investigator of the British-Academy funded project Working for 5 a Day: Research on risk and resilience in the changing food system, which explores work in the horticultural sector in England.

In a previous MMB blogpost Lydia has asked ‘Does it matter that the UK relies on migrant workers to harvest food?‘

Read the introduction to this special blog series from the SPAIS Migration Research Group here.

Moving as being: introducing the SPAIS Migration Group blog series

Posted on by Emily

A special series from the Migration Research Group of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

By Samuel Okyere.

Welcome to the MMB special series by the SPAIS Migration Group, a collective of researchers in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol who are engaged in researching and teaching topics related to migration and mobilities. Many members of the group are themselves migrants with first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of border controls and other experiences associated with the migrant status. Since its establishment in October 2023 the group has worked hard to establish a community for migration researchers in SPAIS as part of its remit to develop migration research and teaching within our School, University and beyond. This has been achieved through seminars, peer-support for draft scholarly publications and grant applications, and mentorship for early career scholars among other efforts. This blog series showcases some of the remarkable migration research and scholarship by our members and in so doing expresses our group’s unique identity. 

(Image by Karen Lau on Unsplash)

The phenomena of migration and the movement of people have always been inherent to the human experience. Contrary to the narrative that portrays these as recent occurrences, for centuries many groups and individuals across the world have migrated temporarily or permanently across geographic, cultural and socioeconomic borders for purposes such as education, marriage, exploration, avoiding socio-political conflicts, responding to climatic events and humanitarian emergencies, and seeking better life opportunities. The difference is that the politics, practices and attitudes towards the phenomenon of continued global migration in this era have become extremely polarised as shown by the dramatic surge in far-right parties and groups in Europe on the back of anti-immigrant sentiments and the ongoing anti-migrant riots in parts of the UK at the time of writing this post. Tensions can arise from concerns about strain on public services and infrastructure. However, the polarisation and growing antagonism towards migrants as characterised by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ sentiment is majorly underpinned by exclusion, race and racism, nationalism, islamophobia and other kinds of religious intolerance. 

The SPAIS Migration Group’s MMB blog series examines these themes and other complexities surrounding the fundamental human right and need to move. The series is timely for several reasons. Firstly, it draws on findings from recent, extensive research conducted by the group’s members in various regions including Europe, Southeast and East Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa to show the globally significant nature of the issues under discussion. The contributions collectively reveal that the portrayal of migration as a crisis and the resulting moral panic are deliberate tactics aimed at limiting migrants and their rights, rather than supporting them. The series brings into sharp relief some of the anti-migrant systems that have emerged as an outcome of the portrayal of migration as a crisis.

Notably, the post by Nicole Hoellerer and Katharine Charsley underlines how bi-national couples are increasingly being pressured into marriage by the UK’s restrictive spouse and partner immigration regulations. Hoellerer and Charsley demonstrate that although the British government claims to oppose ‘forced marriage’, the timing and choice of partner for migrants are not ‘free’ but instead largely influenced by migration policies designed to address the migrant ‘crises’ or control the number of immigrants. The same systemic challenges are created by the UK’s seasonal worker visa (SWV) as Lydia Medland’s blog shows. The SWV scheme, created to fill the horticultural labour market shortage after a lack of EU nationals coming to the UK to pick fruit following Brexit, ties workers to a single employer. As widely documented with other ‘tied’ work visas, the SWV scheme, which is also aimed at preventing migrants from settling in the UK, has similarly exposed migrant workers to severe labour exploitation, worker abuse and debt. 

Secondly, this blog series provides valuable insights into how attitudes to migrants and the associated notion of who belongs or not to the nation state and under what terms are underwritten by racism and ethnic discrimination. This is revealed in Minjae Shin’s post, which discusses how debates around military service in South Korea are closely intertwined with the notion of race, ethnicity and masculinity. Popular rhetoric casts Korean nationals with dual heritage as being ineligible for the country’s mandatory military service, a way of rejecting their equality with ethnically ‘pure’ Koreans and hence their right to equal citizenship. In Brazil, Julio D’Angelo Davies’ shows that notions of ‘race’ and ‘belonging’ are implicitly inscribed through the omission of the country’s African heritage from official nation-building narratives. Migration to Brazil and the founding of the state is presented as an activity that involved white Europeans despite the evidence of the country’s multi-racial make up. The racial politics of migration in Brazil is further exemplified by Maeli Farias’ blog on the Bolsonaro administration’s approach to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers in that country.

Meanwhile, Magda Mogilnicka’s assessment of attitudes towards racial minorities among Polish and Ukrainian migrants in the UK offers further lessons on the inextricable links between racial or ethnic discrimination, migration and belonging. Her blog shows that some Eastern Europeans hold crude racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. However, Mogilnicka cautions against rhetoric that casts East Europeans as racists, struggling to fit into a multicultural Britian. This is not just because racism and Islamophobia remain rife in Britain itself, but also because many East Europeans eventually embrace cultural diversity and make efforts to either live in diverse neighbourhoods or make friendships with those they perceive as racially or ethnically other. 

The blogs in this series also underline how migrants in the different regions and cultures where contributors conducted their research are seeking to navigate the systems of exclusion and fundamental human rights violations that have become a normalised part of their experience. Here, our contributors interdisciplinary research and case studies reveal the ways in which experiences of migration and attitudes towards migrants are strongly linked to factors such as racial and ethnic discrimination, homophobia, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination that construct some migrant groups as a threat and systematically exclude them from access to welfare, rights and justice. Maite Ibáñez Bollerhoff’s blog on the experiences of Muslim refugee women in Germany shows how these barriers occur at the intersection of gender, religion and refugee status. This theme is also the focus of Natalie Brinham’s post on how Rohingya refugees seek to make life liveable in a context where they have been issued ID cards that make a mockery of the principles of ‘freedom’ and ‘protection’, which the cards are supposed to offer.  

 This blog series above all underlines the SPAIS Migration Group’s identity as:  

  1. a group of scholars committed to collaboratively expanding the current theoretical, methodological and empirical boundaries for studying and understanding the lived experiences of migrants; and
  2. a group of migration scholars committed to exposing the creation and value of borders as an affront to the right to move and the wider experience of being human. 

Samuel Okyere is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bristol where he leads the Migration Research Group in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS). His research interests include child labour and child work, migration, trafficking, ‘modern slavery’ and contemporary abolitionism. He is currently Co-I on the five-year European Research Council funded project Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Contemporary World.

Samuel has written previously on the MMB blog about ‘Migrant deaths and the impact on those left behind’.

Transnational borders: from containment to freedom

Posted on by Emily

Borderland 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 militarized landscape, I felt an eerie sense that I had been there before. I looked back at my photos from my trip to the border zone at Ceuta, between Morocco and Spain: the same mesh border fence structure, barbed wire and militarized landscape, and people and cars being funnelled towards guard booths. I had the same sense of foreboding, the same disorientation. The space felt at once uninhabited, and yet it seemed that eyes were everywhere. The local birds nesting in the Calais barbed wire were the main differentiating feature.

This visit to Calais with MMB last April made it very clear to me that national borders are transnational creations. Even though border walls purport to be the materialization of national sovereignty – deriving from and protecting an essential, inner national identity – they are created by transnational, border-crossing technologies, designs and networks. They are recognizable transnational types; indeed, there is very little that is nationally unique. Calais and Ceuta felt similar because they are constituted by the same designs and infrastructures, possibly even built by the same companies. Such border walls and zones could not exist without the transnational circulation of commodities and architectures.

Figure 1. Calais border zone, 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 2. Border crossing from Morocco into Ceuta, Spain, 2016 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)

To aid in this process, there are annual global Border Security Expo’s, which draw tech companies and government officials from around the world in the name of fighting transnational organized crime and terrorism. I attended one of these in 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, with the Multiple Mobilities Collective. Israeli companies lead the way, profiting from the fact that Gaza ‘is a great laboratory’ (Miller and Schivone 2015), creating what some have dubbed the laboratory of ‘the Palestine-Mexico border’ (Miller 2019) where technologies are tried out and data is shared.

Humanitarian infrastructures are also part of this transnational border complex; various types of migrant and refugee camps can be found alongside border walls to simultaneously rescue, contain and incarcerate people on the move. I saw these in Ceuta and on the Moroccan side of the border crossing. In Calais, the container camp that eventually replaced the so-called Jungle – photos of which were displayed at the Fort Vert bird blind, overlooking the now destroyed and remade area of the Jungle – was one such infrastructure (Figures 3 and 4). While the Jungle had complex beginnings, including a mix of organized state abandonment and autonomous organizing (Van Isacker 2020), it ended up being run by humanitarians, who replaced the informal housing and living spaces with shipping containers they could control and surveil (Ticktin 2016). Humanitarian structures such as refugee camps have their own architectures, meant to demonstrate temporariness while anchored in hard, material realities. They are at once ephemeral and carceral (Siddiqui 2024).

Figure 3. Official representation of the history of the ‘Jungle,’ Fort Vert, April 2024 (photo: Miriam Ticktin)
Figure 4. The ‘Jungle’ beside the replacement humanitarian container camp (photo: Léopold Lampert)

These various transnational technologies and designs circulate in the name of national closure. As they travel, they produce and reproduce a political imagination of what a border looks like, what it means to be a secure nation-state, and even what it means to rescue people without compromising borders. Such transnational technologies and infrastructures both produce and justify exclusion and carcerality, rendering racism legitimate.

Borders as people

The transnational nature of borders is also created, marked and made by the people who travel to counter them, to unmake them; that is, by the activists, organizers and academics (like myself!) who work to document, undo, undermine or subvert borders. In other words, many of the movements that challenge borders are also, unsurprisingly, transnational. They are predictably found at many border zones, part of the infrastructure even as they work to undo them. I want to focus on the people-part of the infrastructure (Simone 2004), and the making of the border by way of complexly layered forms of antagonism and cooperation.

No-borders activists, for instance, share knowledge about how to enact sea rescues; they track migrant boats to help when they land; they support people on the move in preparation for their journeys, from providing ziplock bags to keep cell phones dry, to giving informal legal advice. Some call this a version of the ‘underground railroad’, referring to the network of safehouses for those who were enslaved in the United States during the early to mid-19th century, to escape into free states and Canada. Yet while visiting Dover and Calais, it became clear that not only do the knowledge and strategies travel, there is a transnational circuit of people who embody this knowledge, and who circulate too. There were people who had cut their teeth on organizing around the Mediterranean, from Lesbos to Lampedusa, and by fighting border regimes like Frontex. Calais was another stop on this circuit, where people came to help with small boat crossings from Calais to Dover.

The same groups also regularly work with people on the move to occupy abandoned buildings and set up collective living spaces or squats. Informed by scholarship on the topic, they are artists, anarchists, academics and lawyers. I became keenly aware that I, too, am part of these circuits: I have traveled to many border zones, to research and act against them. We embody knowledge to challenge border regimes, attempting to enact unpartitioned visions of the world. Perhaps paradoxically, this layering of political movements and the movement of people working for and against borders helps to create the transnational border and render it recognizable across national contexts.

Borders for whom?

If national borders are created by transnational movement and movements, how about the people they are designed to catch, stop, protect or enable? Even as there is a commensurability between the infrastructures of borders and no-borders, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is harder to name those that we are there to either work with or against; they are the least recognizable as transnational ‘types.’ To be sure, there are social and political movements that have created migrant collective subjects. As I wrote in my first book (Ticktin 2011), the ‘sans papiers’ movement both created and was created by a different collective political subject, the sans papiers themselves, who worked against criminalization by changing their name. Yet, those who move across borders today are perhaps not as easily named or recognized. In part, this is because of the transnational nature of the border: these are not just national struggles, but transnational ones. People move for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of ways.

‘People on the move’ is a name that migrants and no-borders activists have used to get away from legal categories like refugee or economic migrant, which are built on hierarchy and exclusion. And yet, there was no consensus when talking to activists in Calais about what term to use in French: each had a lack. While the term ‘sans papiers’ was still used, it was not ideal, because not all people on the move are without papers; some have temporary papers, some have the wrong papers. They suggested that some use the phrase, ‘personnes exilées’ (people in exile, or exiled people); and yet it is not clear that all people on the move feel to be in exile, not least because there is not always a consistent place from which to be exiled. They mentioned ‘personnes bloquées à la frontière’ or those stopped at the border, but some are stopped in national interiors, and some stop for other reasons. There was the concept of ‘personnes en transit’ – people in transit or transitory people – but the activists pointed out that this has been appropriated by the right, to suggest that people should NOT stay, that France and other places should be transit zones and not permanent residences.

New scholarship is starting to explore the different concepts used to name people on the move, each of which have their own political histories and ontologies: from ‘harraga’, or those who burn borders, in the Tunisian context (M’Charek 2020) to ‘touduke’, or those who steal across borders, from the Chinese context (Chen 2023).

Even as many of us try to create alternative political imaginations of the world to enable everyone to move, to stay and to flourish – politics is, after all, a battle over imagination (Dunne and Raby 2018; Ticktin 2022), where the imagination can help us maintain pre-existing realities or denaturalize the ‘real’ – the inability to ‘capture’, name or fully know those who move suggests that they will remain elusive, their desires and reasons opaque. While borders have an increasingly material, transnational presence, this unknowable Otherness continues to exist, and rather than trying to overcome it, we should respect it as a basic source of freedom.

Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center and Director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CPCP). She publishes widely on topics such as migration, borders, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Her latest book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press (2025).

Listen to Miriam’s Insights and Sounds interview with MMB Director Bridget Anderson on ‘Invasive Others: Plants? People? Pathogens?’.

The racist politics of ‘mindless thuggery’

Posted on by Emily

By Dan Godshaw, Ann Singleton and Bridget Anderson.

We pay respect to the memory of the children killed and to those injured in Southport as well as their families.

In early August 2024 the UK experienced a wave of fascist violence and organised hate of the kind not witnessed since the 1980s. Far right activists ignited unrest throughout the country (largely England and Northern Ireland). Bricks, bats, boots and fists rained down on Black and brown people. Asylum hotels were attacked, set on fire and daubed with racist graffiti. Mosques, advice centres and immigration lawyers were threatened. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described this hateful violence as the ‘mindless’ actions of ‘thugs’, but this wilfully ignores the politics of these events, stripping them of their economic and political meaning and potential remedy. The violence is racist violence, an assertion of white supremacy. A criminal justice crackdown is not enough. Counter demonstrations and chants – ‘we are many, you are few’ and ‘migrants are welcome here’ – show the strength of solidarity and opposition to racism, but they too are not enough. These are responses to symptoms, not to the underlying problems.

Anti-racist protestors in Manchester, UK, August 2024 (image: Mylo Kaye on Unsplash)

Analysing the symptoms is critical to understanding what led to this violence. The original pretext for the unrest was the false claim that the young man (at 17 years old, legally a child) arrested for the murder of three children in Southport had arrived in the UK on a small boat as an asylum seeker. He was, in fact, born and brought up in Cardiff and Lancashire but he was later unnecessarily identified as a ‘child of immigrants’. Those targeted for attack have been ‘non-whites’, asylum seekers and Muslims: ‘Get them out’, ‘Stop the boats’, ‘We want our country back’, ‘England,’ the rioters shouted. Resistance by allies of those targeted has been met with chants of ‘You’re not British anymore’. White Britishness is being used to rally ‘pro-British’ mobs. This mix of hostility to migration, racism and Britishness matters. Because while racism is not acceptable in polite society, hostility to migrants is too often represented and made respectable by the framing of ‘legitimate grievances’. In a statement later denounced by other Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) one of the country’s most senior police officers, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight PCC and chair of the Association of PCCs, put it like this:

The government must acknowledge what is causing this civil unrest in order to prevent it. Arresting people, or creating violent disorder units, is treating the symptom and not the cause. The questions these people want answering; what is the government’s solution to mass uncontrolled immigration? How are the new Labour government going to uphold and build on British values? This is the biggest challenge facing Sir Keir Starmer’s government.

Hostility to immigration and asylum has been drip-fed into political consciousness for more than a century, emerging from a long history of colonial racism. But in recent years the demonisation of asylum seekers has held a central place in British institutional politics. ‘Stop the boats’ is a slogan made ‘respectable’ by both former Conservative and current Labour ministers. Migrant numbers have been represented as an external, existential threat by successive Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries. Asylum was effectively outlawed by the Conservative’s 2023 Illegal Migration Act, but it was under the 1997 New Labour Government that the term ‘asylum seeker’ moved from a description of a legal status to a form of abuse. Their term saw policies become fixated on reducing asylum numbers, the withdrawal of asylum seekers’ permission to work and the dramatic expansion of the privately run immigration detention estate. This has for decades inflicted foreseeable and preventable harm on people held in what Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor recently described as ‘truly shocking’ conditions, purely because of their immigration status.

The same New Labour Government introduced dispersal policies that housed asylum seekers away from support networks into cheap housing run by unaccountable private providers, often in areas where long-term residents were experiencing severe economic hardship and lack of investment. All these policies contributed to further division and toxifying of asylum politics, ‘othering’ asylum seekers and migrants. Racism is roundly decried, and rightly so, but migration ‘concerns’ are actively legitimised and cited as justification for more restrictive policies.

Across the world, human mobility is increasingly presented as a threat to citizens, with border deterrents a way to manage populations defined as surplus to the needs of capital. By framing migration as an invasion and drawing sharp lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, wealthy nation states  pursue a war on migration. Supported by a growing border industry, in which profits are made by corporations subcontracted to prevent, detect and deter unauthorised movement, states enact what activists and scholars have termed ‘border violence’, resulting in death and injury. Violent borders such as razor-wire topped fences maim and trap people in ‘death zones’ between states; these borders are internalised within bureaucracies, universities, hospital and schools; they exceed territoriality through boat and land pushbacks and offshore detention sites. The failure of national and European policies has fatal consequences. But rather than facing and responding to these failures, politicians blame the illegal and extortionate markets they themselves have created for human smuggling, claiming these are the sole cause of untold numbers of deaths during migration.

According to the narrative pushed by Starmer and others about the rioters, it is ‘thugs’ who get confused between migrants and the mosque-attending ‘multi-cultural’ public, or between asylum seekers and the social care worker going about her business. Yet the Windrush scandal demonstrates, if demonstration were needed, that creating a ‘really hostile environment for illegal migration’ also means creating a really hostile environment for Black and brown people whatever their citizenship. As the poorly trained general population is increasingly drawn into immigration enforcement, often anxious to err on the side of the law they rely on race and/or ethnicity as a marker of national difference, thereby exposing how ideas of Britishness are in practice bound up with whiteness. As A. Sivanandan, former director of the Institute of Race Relations, observed many years ago ‘We all carry our passports on our faces’.

The phrase ‘mindless thuggery’ mobilises a slur used in the UK and the US against economically marginalised people who are also racialised. Austerity-driven economic policies have produced social and economic conditions that have pitched impoverished communities racialised as white against those racialised as Black and ‘other’. Migration policies focused on reducing people to the essentialised identity of ‘migrant’ have created legitimacy for these attacks. What is needed, alongside incisive placards, demonstrations and counter chants, is a political ground shift. Migration, as a fundamental dimension of human life, must be normalised and accounted for across all areas of public policy. The hostile environment must be dismantled. Politicians must stop scapegoating ‘migrants’ for the social harms of neoliberalism. Instead, they must address elite power and inequality, and invest in housing and public services. We have had enough of decades of state and corporate-driven violence at the border and elsewhere. With anything less than a fundamental shift in political discourse, racist violence on the street, whether random or organised, will not go away.

Dan Godshaw is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. He specialises in migration, with a particular focus on state violence, immigration detention and the intersectional dimensions of border harms.

Ann Singleton is Reader in Migration Policy in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, and MMB Policy Strategic Lead. She is a leading expert in the production and use of international migration data in policy development.

Bridget Anderson is Director of MMB and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship at the University of Bristol. She is currently co-PI on the research project Protecting Irregular Migrants in Europe (PRIME).

Finding movement: ethnographic work with Emberá Dobidá in Medellín

Posted on by Emily

By Agathe Faure.

For two years, in 2018 and 2019, I immersed myself in the lives of Emberá Dobidá families who had migrated from Colombia’s Pacific coastal region of the Chocó to the bustling urban environment of Medellín. Their journey from rainforest settlements to the country’s second largest city was clearly a defining feature of their lives. But through my research I learned that ‘movement’ was central to the Emberá Dobidá not only in terms of this life-changing migration but also in the stories they told me of their past and in the observations I made of their everyday experience of the city. Movement, whether in the Chocó or in Medellín, shaped social relationships for the Emberá Dobidá. If it was either expanded or contained, their sociality was impacted.

Early on in my fieldwork, I was struck by the recurrence of news articles and everyday conversations in Colombia that acknowledged the growing urbanisation of Indigenous peoples. But whenever I shared my research interests with governmental and non-governmental institutions, as well as with Indigenous organisations and academics, I hit a wall. Most seemed uncomfortable with the topic, brushing it aside to explain Indigenous migration to cities as a necessity or an embarrassment, something Indigenous people did to study and find better economic opportunities, or to flee the armed conflict that continues to rage in their territories. When I turned to published studies, I mainly found official reports that emphasised the automatic acculturation of Indigenous peoples who, presumably forced to settle in cities, lost the material and spiritual resources that had ensured their cultural reproduction in their ancestral territories (for example, ACNUR 2006).

The Emberá Dobidá have been seen as one of the most dramatic examples of this process of urbanisation and acculturation (Corte Constitucional, 2009, 2010; RCN 2022). But following my fieldwork I am critical of the tendency to link Indigenous urbanisation with cultural erosion. Instead, my perspective has been informed by studies of multiculturalism in Colombia (for example, Chaves and Zambrano, 2006; Jaramillo, 2011; Vélez-Torres, 2013), which go beyond a static understanding of attaching cultures to specific geographical spaces. This perspective shows that, since the Colombian constitutional reform of 1991, the idea of internal difference has grounded each corner of the country in a specific cultural identity and has led to the sedentarisation of ethnic groups in bounded territories.

The ethnographic history of the Emberá Dobidá shows that they have long lived in fluid, small and mobile settlements, scattered across the rainforest of the Chocó (see, for example, Faron, 1962; Losonczy, 1997a, 1997b, 2006; Pardo-Rojas, 1992; Tayler, 1996). According to these records, movement between settlements enabled a flexible form of cooperation amongst Emberá Dobidá kin and non-kin, tying and untying relations between them. In the life stories I collected, however, I quickly realised that the sedentarisation of Emberá Dobidá in villages since the 1990s had threatened cooperation and heightened conflicts. Coupled with various forms of territorial encroachment and a long-standing aspiration for urban life, sedentarisation led to longer, wider, patterns of migration, with a growing population of Emberá Dobidá settling in faraway cities.

Map representing the different movements of the author’s interlocutors across the Chocó and to Medellín (author’s drawing, 2023)

Through my long-term, intimate engagement with the Emberá Dobidá I came to know how they tried to adjust their mobility in urban contexts. Often during fieldwork, I was caught out by lengthy conversations about the exact details of journeys here and there, modes of transport, lengths of journeys, costs and surprises on the way. Discussions then always shifted towards the everyday practice of moving, outside of the house and in the street. Emberá Dobidá men and women liked to share with me stories of what they had observed and gathered when they walked around Medellín – from the boxes and bags full of fruits and vegetables that they were given from merchants in various spots of the city, to the jewellery or toys they found in bins. In order for them to get hold of the things Medellín had to offer, most Emberá Dobidá knew they had to take particular routes around the city and move at a particular pace. The ones who moved would know about and collect things they needed, desired, on their path. Others, ‘the ones who didn’t walk’ (los que no caminan) or the ones who ‘stayed still in the house’ (se quedan quieto/as en la casa), would remain ‘ignorant’ (no saben), poor in knowledge as well as in material goods.

Emberá Dobidá children looking onto the streets of Medellín (author’s photograph, 2019)

It was also through the unrelenting streams of demands I received from the Emberá Dobidá that I became more aware of the social texture that movement held for them. Because I was travelling a lot, between Emberá Dobidá households, across Medellín, back to France and the UK, the Emberá Dobidá said I knew and had a lot. But they also expected me to revoke the inequalities movement temporarily created by giving what I had to them – those who, in comparison to me, had stayed put. The intricate dynamics in our relationships sharpened my eye to the multitude of physical, embodied movements that shaped my interlocutors’ daily realities. I slowly realised that moving had to have a specific social purpose for them: it rippled through their relationships and translated into reciprocal gestures of giving and receiving. These, in turn, produced the ‘good energies’ that moved between bodies and sustained moral life for the Emberá Dobidá.

But most of the times in the city, the Emberá Dobidá I know found it hard to preserve the precarious and delicate balance between movement of people, exchanges of care and flows of energy, and the egalitarian ethos this balance aims to support. Unemployment, poverty, racial discrimination or institutional exclusion have immobilised them. This has resulted in the rise of what my interlocutors often described as ‘bad energies’ and provoked a general sense of decline in how the Emberá Dobidá people manage social relations today. Through my work with the families in Medellín I became aware of forms of social disruption that are not captured in the conventional understanding of cultural erosion through displacement. The Emberá Dobidá did not feel they lost culture because they left their villages. Instead, complex, historical disturbances in their practices of movement have shaken their sociality. This suggests that an attention to various scales and textures of movement may shed light on the everyday experiences of social change that occur with Indigenous urbanisation beyond the Emberá Dobidá context alone.

Agathe Faure recently finished her PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her thesis, titled ‘Movements of Care’, focuses on the intimate experiences of structural change amongst the Emberá Dobidá in Colombia. Agathe currently works as an LSE Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, teaching courses such as economic anthropology and anthropology of development.

Bordering Bristol: looking to see

Posted on by Emma

By Bridget Anderson and Emma Newcombe.

Between February and July 2024 MMB was delighted to host Victoria Hattam, Professor of Politics from the New School For Social Research, New York, as Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor. One of the key themes emerging from her visit was how we can incorporate visuality into our methodological toolbox. We realised we are always active viewers, framing and focussing, but also that we do a lot of looking, and that looking and seeing are not at all the same. While it sounds very focussed, looking is what we do when we are inattentive. Seeing demands attention and raises questions. Looking accumulates assumptions. Seeing can start to dispel them.

On 22nd May 2024, here at the University of Bristol, we participated in a workshop on visual methods run by Professor Hattam and Dr Nariman Massoumi (Department of Film and Television) exploring bordering and the university. We all used smartphones to take images, which you can see in the gallery below.

It felt strange printing out the images during the session given that we do so much digitally nowadays. But, in fact, it really made a difference to the group discussion because we could look at the images together, move them around and group them in different ways. We haven’t wasted the paper either as participants took away their own images and the rest are on the wall in the MMB office.

Some of the participants were worried that they didn’t have photography skills up to the task. Look through the images below and you will notice that they needn’t have worried. We all felt that wandering around Royal Fort Gardens at the heart of the university allowed us to pay attention to small details that you might ordinarily pass by without a thought. The exercise helped us to ‘see’ differently, which made it easier to frame a thoughtful image. We also saw many different interpretations of borders – apart from two people who managed to take virtually the same shot of a blue canvas tent pegged to the grass! Despite photographing different subjects we found connections through form and colour. Almost all the images were close ups, and there were no distance shots. Why was that? Does that tell us something about how we see borders? Or how our visual framings are affected by smartphones? Or maybe it was just easier to find meaning on a close-up scale.

Bridget Anderson is Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship in the School for Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol.

Emma Newcombe is Manager of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB). She supports and develops Bristol’s internal research community to produce new thinking on people and movement.

Across the waters: Caribbean mobilities, itineraries, histories

Posted on by Emily

By Orlando Deavila Pertuz and Bethan Fisk.

What stories are told about the Caribbean? What do these narratives exclude? How can we broaden the story? And how can we teach a wider vision of the Caribbean to students of all ages and wider publics?

Orlando Deavila Pertuz from the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia, joined us at the University of Bristol in November 2023 to share his work on internal migration in Caribbean Colombia and take part in a workshop centred on how we tell stories about the Caribbean. Orlando’s perspective demonstrates the importance of including Latin American and mainland Caribbean mobilities, histories and cultural production to how we think about the region.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz shared his research on rural to urban migration from the former maroon community of Palenque, in Caribbean Colombia, to the city of Cartagena. Palenqueros, who speak their own creole language, experienced a profound racialisation with lack of access to employment and housing, and created enclaves and endogamous communities apart from the mainstream society, leading to the creation of what Deavila Pertuz calls the ‘first racial-based movements in Cartagena during the 1980s’. His work details the place of race in the production of urban space and how race guided the life experience of the rural migrants that flocked the city’s peripheries during the twentieth century.

Old city walls, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia (image: Justin Sovich on flickr)

Bridging the gap: stories from the Greater Caribbean

The Colombian Caribbean shares a common history with the islands and continental territories of the Caribbean basin. This is a history marked, mostly, by processes including colonialism, transatlantic slavery, the presence of imperial powers, the permanent flow and exchange of people, cultures, capital and goods, and, more recently, the contradictory effects of tourism development. Cartagena (or Cartagena de Indias) is a key site for understanding African diasporic and Caribbean history. The city was the centre of the Spanish American slave trade for two centuries, the colony’s most important port, home to the Inquisition with jurisdiction over the whole region, and a major place of afrodescendiente political mobilisation in Colombia’s nineteenth-century revolutionaries wars, independence and beyond. Black mobilities during and after slavery have long connected the long northern coast of South America to the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. Indeed, the Caribbean was fundamental to Colombia’s independence. When Spanish royalists defeated Simon Bolívar during the early years of the war of independence, he found asylum in the British colony of Jamaica and later in Haiti. The Republic offered ships and weapons to Bolívar so he might resume the struggle for independence. However, by the twentieth century, Colombian elites had turned their back on the Caribbean.

While nineteenth-century architects of the nation sought to de-Caribbeanise the newly named ‘Atlantic’ coast, it continued to be shaped by movements and cultural flows from and between the islands throughout the twentieth century, through labour migration—most notably West Indian workers for the United Fruit Company including Marcus Garvey—to the popularity of baseball and boxing. Deavila Pertuz asks, how do we make a history of Colombia as part of the Greater Caribbean? How do we bridge the gap that Colombian elites created since the nineteenth century?

Caribbean stories across borders

The Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe, founded in 1993, has been at the forefront of the academic endeavour of reintegrating the northern coast of South America into conceptions of and studies of the Caribbean. One of the key reasons for meeting was a workshop to collectively think through how we can have broader stories about the Caribbean across borders, whether those be boundaries of empire, language or discipline, and within academia, educational institutions and beyond.

With an eye to thinking about how we can broaden understandings of the Caribbean in diverse educational settings, Deavila Pertuz traced the pioneering work of the Instituto in the creation of teaching materials. Materials included school primers entitled ‘Afrodescendants in Cartagena: A Story To Be Told’ (2011) matched with archival documents from the Centro de Documentación para la Historia y la Cultura de los Afrodescendientes en el Caribe Colombiano (CEDACC) (the Centre for Documentation of the History and Culture of the Afrodescendants in the Colombian Caribbean). Its purpose is to facilitate access for local researchers, teachers and students to archival sources held in the General Archive of the Nation in Bogotá and the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. Once established, CEDACC facilitated the creation of new knowledge, not only about the city’s history but also about these historical processes, such as the slavery, independence and colonialism that the northern coast of Colombia shared with the Greater Caribbean. In order to make this content accessible to a wider audience, the Instituto produced a CD collection with key sources of transcribed archival documents. In 2013, it also launched a short documentary series called ‘Cartagena: piel de cimarrones’, exploring histories of slavery, independence, cultural production and the experiences of Afro-Colombian women.

Towards broader Caribbean stories

The workshop in Bristol was concluded with an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion from colleagues in Anthropology, Education, English and HiPLA (Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies), along with local teachers and some brilliant year nine students. Some crucial collaborations emerged which form the basis of a future project that will bring together community groups, schools and teachers to co-produce resources for teaching a multilingual, multi-imperial and multi-ethnic history of the early modern Caribbean.

Bethan Fisk is Lecturer in Colonial Latin American History in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on slavery, cultural geographies and the production of knowledge by people of African and indigenous descent in Colombia and the African diaspora.

Orlando Deavila Pertuz is Assistant Professor at the Instituto Internacional de Estudios del Caribe at the Universidad de Cartagena, Colombia. As a social and urban historian his work focuses on the history of the development of tourism, the informal city and the construction of race and ethnicity in modern-day Colombia.

‘We’ll double your change!’ The materiality and mobility of cash in contemporary Argentina

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Luis Bradley.

In January 2024, the Central Bank of Argentina (BCRA) announced that two new, higher denomination banknotes (ARS10,000 and ARS20,000) would be placed into circulation by the summer. The rift between the value to be printed on these notes and the highest denomination note currently available at the time of writing (ARS2,000) points to the stark inadequacy of the country’s cash in even the most mundane of everyday transactions for items whose prices have been hit by rapid rates of inflation. Consequently, the movement of cash in Argentina is characterised by obstacles arising from the very form of the cash itself. This struck me on the first day of a visit to Buenos Aires in March this year, when I found that what I had considered to be a substantial sum of pesos remaining from my last trip (in 2022) would buy me only two to three items at a local supermarket. To my further chagrin, I did not have my passport with me meaning I was unable, as a foreigner, to pay for my purchases by card. I thus had to return the items one by one until I could pay off the balance, resulting in a long queue behind me and many pointed stares.

Wads of 100 peso notes, bearing the image of Eva Perón, accumulated in change by the author in late 2022. Each note is now worth scarcely one pence (photo: author’s own, March 2024).

The main objective of my trip to Buenos Aires was to witness the everyday mobility of cash under the presidency of Javier Milei, who came to power in December 2023. Milei’s promotion of libertarian economics, currently slashing funding for national cultural bodies such as the national film agency (INCAA), is frequently justified by the argument that there is no money following the excesses of previous administrations, and that a financial ‘chainsaw’ is required to cut expenditure. More generally, however, the status of cash in Argentina has long been linked to notions of instability and inadequacy. As a virtual tour of the national numismatic museum confirms, frequent, recurring inflationary episodes from the 19th century onwards have resulted in the rapid devaluation of banknotes, leading on many occasions to the adoption of a new currency worth a thousand times the previous iteration.

In such conditions, demand for US dollars as a more stable means of investment has been high, often infamously stored under mattresses and outside the national economy. To combat this, the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) administration restricted US dollar purchases from 2011 to 2015, prompting middle- and upper-class protests and encouraging informal, illegal money exchanges, whose agents operate with a more advantageous rate known as the ‘blue dollar’ (Sánchez 2017; Perelman 2021). The Kirchner and the later Alberto Fernández (2019-2023) governments attempted to remedy this by adopting differential dollar rates available to certain individuals at certain times, though this resulted in a plethora of rates (among them the ‘Qatar dollar’ and the ‘Coldplay dollar’) fostering a lingering atmosphere of low confidence in the value of the Argentine peso.  

My interest in money in Argentina stems from what I would describe as a resistant materiality in everyday cash. Given the persisting need to engage with large quantities of banknotes, whether pesos or dollars, many Argentines and foreigners alike are faced with the daily challenges of carrying, handling, counting, storing and hiding what are effectively pieces of paper (an example of these challenges is depicted in Pedro Mairal’s 2016 bestseller The Woman from Uruguay, translated by Jennifer Croft). Once I had settled into my accommodation in Buenos Aires, I set out to collect some pesos I had wired myself. This has been a common route used by foreigners to profit from juicier exchange rates and avoid card and withdrawal fees. Nonetheless, this option does involve several risks, notably the length of queuing times, the potential lack of cash to dispense and the possibility of theft on the journey home. Surprisingly on this occasion, however (and despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary), I did not face a long queue at the branch, perhaps owing to a recent measure offering foreign cardholders a much better exchange rate aligned with the financial market rate, lessening the pull of informal exchange houses for tourists in Argentina.

Once I had confirmed my identity, the agent proceeded to feed a large number of banknotes through a counting machine. Back in 2022, I was caught out by the sheer sum of the notes I would receive, leading to an uncomfortable walk back to the hotel with my jacket stuffed full of cash. This time, while armed with a large bag, I still found the piles of banknotes difficult to calculate, meaning I would always prefer to carry much more than necessary to the shops. Receiving change was also often troublesome: cashiers would often ask me for one note back to reduce the total number of notes returned, but most notes were of so little value that they did nothing but clog up my wallet. At one point, when I was owed 10 pesos in change (less than 1 pence), I was instead offered a voucher redeemable for 20 if I shopped with the supermarket again. While the voucher proclaimed excitedly that my change would be doubled, the scale of that doubling was much less exciting.

Thankfully, my trip also allowed me to think about things other than cash, with highlights including the annual conference of the Argentine Association of Audiovisual and Film Studies, an excellent Borges-themed production at the Teatro San Martín, and a productive discussion with several students of Dr Valeria Llobet at the Universidad de San Martín. However, as stormy weather delayed my return flight by 24 hours, I couldn’t help reflecting on how my daily experiences with money in Argentina challenged the common associations of currency with the purely abstract and symbolic, particularly in those countries, such as the UK, where cash payments are dwindling. Rather than thinking of money solely as a neutral, universal equivalent – the ‘colourless tool’ described by Georg Simmel in his landmark The Philosophy of Money – the case of Argentina prompts me to consider cash as a thoroughly material obstacle to be navigated not just mentally, but physically.

Juan Luis Bradley is a PhD researcher at the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Bristol. His research explores depictions of the everyday materiality of money in Argentine literature and cinema from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on the affective implications of Argentine money in crisis for those who negotiate it.

For other recent MMB blogposts on Argentina read Jo Crow’s post on ‘(Im)mobility in Buenos Aires (1929-2023)‘.

Bodies, things, capital – intersections in our research themes

Posted on by Emily

By Juan Zhang.

As co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital’ I have been reading our recent blogs under this theme and am struck by the range and depth of the projects. They cross many contexts, disciplines and research fields, and engage with critical debates around (in)justice, vulnerability, borders and the politics of (im)mobility. From Jo Crow’s personal reflections on the broader implications of economic and social immobility in Argentina through a historical lens to Julia Morris’ poetic account on the damaging politics of ‘value extraction’ through offshore asylum processing in the Republic of Nauru; from Rebecca Yeo’s critiques on the disabling impact of the UK’s immigration control measures to Şebnem Eroğlu’s observation of the long-lasting generational poverty among Turkish migrants in Europe, these blogs provoke thoughtful discussions and raise fundamental questions about the politics of movements through bodies, things and capital. These accounts challenge us to think more critically about the multiple intersections of personal experiences, structural inequalities, infrastructural barriers, historical legacies, and geopolitical shifts on both local and global scales. These reflections and scholarly engagements are central to our research at Migration Mobilities Bristol.

(Image: Eddie Aguirre, UnSplash)

Bodies

Bodies are intimate sites of encounter – with borders, checkpoints, institutions, infrastructures, policies, biases and discriminatory politics. It is pertinent to recognise the ways in which migrant bodies are intersectionally positioned within and across systems, and this positioning is influenced by various factors including gender, class and race, as well as immigration status (legal or illegal), moral claims (deserving or underserving), and capacities (shaped by disability or other forms of vulnerability). The blogs also prompt us to consider the colonial and contemporary contexts that influence how bodies are perceived and treated.

Julia Morris’ ethnographic work on asylum and extraction, for example, compares the extractive logic in both Nauru’s mineral and asylum processing industries. The colonial legacy of phosphate mining in this island nation finds an uncanny reiteration of a ‘hyper-extractive assemblage’ in modern-day outsourced asylum processing centres, lending particular ‘political, economic and moral values to the global asylum industry’. In this context, the bodies of asylum-seekers become a kind of resource, exploited and commodified in a way not that different from processing phosphate. At the same time, Nauruans themselves are depicted by global media campaigns and refugee activists as ‘savages’ of cruelty, a racialised and stigmatised image rooted in colonial-era stereotypes.

In other blogs under my Research Challenge theme, critical discussions also extend to how migrant bodies are judged based on an (often) arbitrary assessment of ability and the perceived deservability, which influence decisions on vital matters such as access to social services and support, and family reunification in the UK. When bodies encounter policies and perceptions in these intertwined realms, it provides an impetus for urgent scholarly interventions in popular politics, especially at a moment when ‘one in five Britons say that immigration is one of the top issues facing the country’, and the UK’s Rwanda plan continues to stir controversy and deepen socio-political divisions.    

Things

Things offer another analytical engagement with materialities, spatialities and temporalities in migration, through which social relations and identities are shaped and evolved. Things can be objects (for example, passports, visas, maps and tickets) and systems (for example, policies, rules, processing facilities, services), as well as larger transnational bodies (for example, activist groups and NGOs) and infrastructures (for example, media, national services, and cross-national agreements). Things can be physical and metaphorical, and they highlight how movements intersect with broader contexts of trade, exchange and securitisation. Borders are a good example of things – they can be barriers or productive pathways, depending on who (and what) is crossing them. Offshore processing centres in Nauru become de facto maritime borders for Australia, where immigration control is outsourced and externalised. The Jungle in Calais demonstrates another case in point of externalised bordering, where no safe passage is provided by design, in order to deter migrant crossing into the UK. Things such as tents, makeshift dwellings, and temporary shelters are targeted by the French border police to enforce a ‘no fixation’ rule, preventing people on the move from establishing a sense of stable connection to the city and forcing them to move on or go into hiding.

Apart from borders, urban transport infrastructure offers another interesting take on things, where domestic workers in Latin America, predominantly women, struggle with long commuting hours and concerns for discrimination and crime. While public transport allows workers to travel to their employers’ homes, it is woefully inadequate in terms of providing efficient and reliable services or a safe space for female workers to be comfortable with their daily commute. Essential infrastructures such as public transport are things inherently gendered and classed, as they mediate movements and mobilities in highly embodied and differentiated ways.

Capital      

Capital emerges as another compelling common thread that brings together reflections on value, differentiation and the infrastructuralisation of ‘extractive politics’ through the control and channelling of local and global flows of humans, resources, knowledge and policy frameworks. It is curious to see how the example of offshore asylum processing in Nauru gains instant ‘political capital’ in the UK, when top decision makers use it as a success model to justify sending asylum seekers to Rwanda as a winning solution. The income-tested immigration rule in the UK also effectively monetises the right to family reunification, turning a universal right into a kind of money game, where the right to bring family to the UK comes with a hefty price tag of £29,000, an income the majority of the working population do not earn. This approach reflects a transactional view on migration, where people are either regarded as assets or liabilities to the capital system, rather than human beings with intrinsic social and familial rights. Even for those who have successfully migrated, like the Turkish migrants in Europe described by Şebnem Eroğlu, structural inequalities and systemic racism create barriers for them to transfer social and cultural capital in meaningful ways, thereby limiting their opportunities to capitalise on these resources for a better life. These cases demonstrate how migration policies and individual lives are impacted by a profound ‘capital logic’, where extractive politics are normalised to maximise accumulation and sideline fundamental ethical considerations.

Multimodal methodologies

In addition to tracing conceptual connections around bodies, things and capital in these blogs, I have also noted the development of multimodal methodologies, particularly creative and art-based methods focusing on participatory designs and artistic interventions. These approaches have effectively bridged the gap between academic research, public engagement and activism. Other innovative methods, including data visualisation and participant mapping techniques, open up possibilities for experimenting with data collection and analysis. Sylvanna Falcon and her team, for example, use data visualisation techniques to map violence against migrants in Mexico while cautioning against the dehumanisation of migrants who disappear into ‘datasets’. Robledo and Randall’s Invisible Commutes project utilises short audio segments to document experiences of daily commutes by domestic workers, as well as their perspectives on critical mobility infrastructure in the city. The incorporation of migrant voices lends a significant feminist perspective to issues of transport justice.

This Research Challenge has brought diverse researchers and their perspectives and methods together, a kind of assembling of bodies, things and capital in its own right. There is clear potential for developing collaborations and innovating strategies of research practice and intervention in the future, as this Research Challenge brings forward MMB’s commitment to informing academic and public dialogues on migration and mobilities across disciplines and borders.

Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on transnational cultural politics in and out of China, and Chinese mobilities across different cultural and social spheres. She is the Co-ordinator of the MMB Research Challenge ‘Bodies, Things, Capital.’