Migrants and Refugees at UK Borders: Hostility and 'Unmaking' the Human

This book explores the hostile environment and politics of visceral and racial denigration towards refugees and migrants in the UK and Europe, rooted in Western Enlightenment theories of scientific superiority and coloniality. It analyzes the rhetoric of camps, refrigerated death lorries, channel crossings, and corporeal resistance in detention centers, deconstructing the intersection of dominant ideologies, power, and knowledge paradigms in the public sphere.

Format: Hardback
Length: 188 pages
Publication date: 28 February 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into the hostile environment and politics of visceral and racial denigration that have characterized responses to refugees and migrants within the UK and Europe in recent years. The European 'migrant crisis, which began in 2015, has been marked by an atmosphere that dehumanizes refugees and migrants, deeply rooted in Western Enlightenment trajectory and linked to Western theories of scientific superiority that gave rise to eugenics and colonialism. The book focuses on the 'migrant crisis, Brexit, and the impacts of the global pandemic, unraveling the waves of crises and neuroses about the 'Other in Europe and the UK. The chapters analyze the rhetoric of camps, refrigerated death lorries, the notion of channel crossings and 'accidental drownings, the formation of relationships with border architecture such as razor wire, and corporeal resistance in detention centers through hunger strikes. By examining these specific sites of rhetorical articulation, policy formation, social imagination, and their attendant visuality, the chapters deconstruct the intersection of dominant ideologies, power, knowledge paradigms (including the media), as part of the public sphere and their collective re-mediation of dispossessed humans on the shores and borders of Europe. This interdisciplinary volume is of interest to researchers in migration, humanitarianism, geography, global development, sociology, and communication studies.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032071831