Georgie Wemyss

Everyday bordering, belonging and the reorientation of British immigration legislation

The article 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.

Introduction to the special issue: racialized bordering discourses on European Roma

ABSTRACT In the introduction to this special issue, we briefly introduce everyday bordering as the theoretical framing for the papers and explore its relationship to the process of racialization. We introduce our situated intersectional approach to the study of everyday bordering, illustrating the importance of capturing the differentially situated gazes of a range of social actors. We then go on to contextualize the importance of this framing and approach in a wider discussion of Roma in Europe before concluding with a summary of the particular contributions of each of the papers in this special issue to these debates.

“People think that Romanians and Roma are the same”: everyday bordering and the lifting of transitional controls

ABSTRACT 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 2013–15 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.