Jonathan Darling

Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment:

This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of ‘compassionate repression’. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agambens figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British governments apparent turn to a ‘deliberate policy of destitution’, I argue that through such acts of sovereign abandonment asylum seekers are relegated to a position reliant solely upon the ethical sensibilities of others. I then proceed to consider ways in which such a positioning ‘outside the law’ has been employed by asylum seekers and local campaigners to make ethical claims and demands upon the relational nature of the citizen as a figure of potential bare life. I then close by arguing that such an ethical gesture alone, of ‘assuming bare life’, is not enough and that the outright rejection of logics of distinction which Agamben suggests as a future politics offers little means to politically engage bare life beyond an irreconcilable ethic of the unconditionally hospitable. Opposed to this, I suggest the need to (re)engage with political theories which draw the political as always already an ethical practice in itself. Here, I examine the UKs involvement in the UNHCR Gateway Protection Programme, as an example of a conditional, and imperfect, act of hospitality, one grounded in distinction, yet one which holds both the risks of ethical practice and the possibility of political alteration at its heart.

Forced migration and the city: irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence

This paper explores the relationship between forced migration and the city. The paper outlines four accounts of the city centred on: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the ‘re-scaling’ of borders, and the city as a sanctuary. Whilst valuable, these discussions maintain a focus on sovereign authority that tends to prioritize the policing of forced migration over the possibilities for contestation that also emerge through cities. Arguing for a fuller engagement with debates in urban geography, this paper considers how discussions of urban informality and the politics of presence may better unpack the urban character of forced migration.

Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum

In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: That of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the paper opens by offering a governmental reading of letters as things which define the limits of present and future actions, whilst fixing individuals to specific locations. The paper then destabilises such a reading by considering how letters are understood through material-discursive entanglements of things, discourses, and spaces, such that letters are understood through, and help to constitute, different atmospheres, spaces, and subjectivities of asylum. Thus I argue that it is by taking seriously the connections between materials, discourses, and affective states that we might critically interrogate framings of the state as an oppressive force shaping the lives of those seeking asylum.

Moral Urbanism, Asylum, and the Politics of Critique:

The city of Sheffield was the UKs first ‘City of Sanctuary’, an identification which suggested that the city would act to welcome asylum seekers and refugees through promoting a ‘culture of hospitality’. In this paper I seek to interrogate such claims and explore how the promotion of a language of hospitality marks a form of ‘moral urbanism’ through which the city is linked to specific values and obligations that enable the governmental ordering of responses to asylum. In exploring public statements, media discussions, and interview accounts of asylum in the city, I argue that a normative account of how to live with asylum is articulated, one which establishes expectations of both citizens and noncitizens alike. The paper opens by tracing this narrative construction of Sheffield as a place with a ‘welcoming tradition’ through a series of high-profile events of refuge and their reiterative embedding in the public imaginary. I then question this account through demonstrating how such moments of welcome are conditioned by logics of acceptability and control, before considering how the governmental entanglements of moral urbanism might be contested through a politics of critique.

Acts, ambiguities, and the labour of contesting citizenship

Abstract This afterword discusses a variety of approaches to exploring the contestation of citizenship, and foregrounds the spatial politics that underpin forms of contestation, struggle and claims making. Beginning with a reflection on how recent work has sought to explore citizenship ‘from below’, this afterword asks how citizenship studies might begin to accommodate an expanded range of sites, subjects and practices in the contestation of citizenship. Studying acts of citizenship and the minor interventions that surround such acts, the often ambiguous nature of citizenship claims and the prosaic learning that goes into producing the conditions for contestation, all offer useful directions to explore. However, addressing the contestation nature of citizenship requires both exploring these practices in relation to one another, and exploring how established and normative models of citizenship variously incorporate, co-opt and manage forms of contestation as they continue to ‘make citizens’. I conclude by reflecting on how the governmental process of ‘making citizens’ is also one of constructing spaces, mobilising materials and producing affective responses of hope, fear, hatred and desire.

Book review: Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

local churches, whose large memberships and charismatic leaders have played leading roles in facilitating activism. The final empirical chapter situates these individual drivers within a broader institutional landscape, considering the influence of local government agencies, community development corporations, and industrial actors. Here Fuller casts a sobering light on the limitations to activism even in Martindale-Brightwood, where efforts to attain more comprehensive solutions to environmental injustice have been blunted by political realities and partially co-opted by an anodyne agenda for ‘sustainability’. Fuller’s comparative case study approach is a refreshing and valuable intervention in a field of research dominated by studies of single cases, and it provides a useful resource for scholars of environmental justice and urban environmental activism. Although other studies analyze both spatial patterns of injustice and historical processes underlying them, few also delve into individual and institutional influences on present-day activism. Fuller’s reflections on the methodological challenges he faced as an ‘outsider’ are also highly instructive for beginning researchers. A downside of the breadth of Fuller’s analysis is that – in a rather short book – there is less room for in-depth treatment of any of the individual topics, such as neighborhood history, the formation of social capital, or processes extending beyond the local scale. The book evidently went from dissertation defense to publication with limited revisions, and a more extensive editing process might have both expanded and tightened the narrative, while casting aside some of the rougher and more tentative traces of the dissertation. Nonetheless, my hope is that the book will provide a starting point not only for more research from Fuller, but also for inquiries by others that build on his findings and perhaps also challenge his explanations. As the concept of environmental justice has traveled and demonstrated its staying power, the question of why it so often fails to mobilize activism in places where we would expect to find it has become all the more intriguing.