Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.     

Linguistic incomprehension in British asylum appeal hearings

For the thousands of appellants who navigate Britain's asylum appeal courts every year, attending a hearing conducted in a language they do not understand and participating via an interpreter, is usually viewed as a significant disadvantage. The findings of a study that entailed ethnographic and structured observations of over 390 asylum appeal hearings in England and Wales during 2013 and 2014, however, indicate that the presence of interpreters often offers an important source of support in adversity. While the natural assumption may be to associate linguistic incomprehension with detriment, it transpires that there are important exceptions to this rule. Given the toughening of UK border controls in recent years, as well as British reluctance to share responsibilities for international refugees such as those fleeing from violence in Syria, these observations offer rare solace in a bleak policy landscape.     

试论现代物流的地理学研究及发展趋势

基于阐述现代物流的发展背景,本文介绍了国际地理学对现代物流的研究进展,分析了其主要研究论点;同时探讨了我国现代物流的地理学研究进展,并分析了物流地理学的提出和理论体系;然后探讨了现代物流的地理学研究切入点和发展趋势。     

Control and Abandonment: The Power of Surveillance on Refugees in Italy,During and After the Mare Nostrum Operation

Migrants' daily arrivals to Italy's southern coasts and continuous shipwrecks in the Mediterranean have captured international media attention, producing a fixation on the scene of landing and a deliberate marginalization of what happens to migrants and refugees after the moment of landing. This paper aims to refocus analytical attention on the lives of asylum seekers after landing in Europe, breaking through the institutional silence that is cast upon the infrastructure of the camp, the logic of assistance and the bureaucratic waiting zone asylum seekers are stuck in. By documenting political changes in European and national policies, the paper reflects on the forms of institutional control and abandonment refugees are subjected to once they land in Italy, and are housed in the governmental camps and extraordinary structures which arose at the time of the Mare Nostrum Operation where strict discipline, carelessness, uncertainty and confusion intertwine.     

‘That awful place was home’:1 Reflections on the Contested Meanings of craig dunain asylum

The paper explores a particular Scottish asylum geography (Craig Dunain Hospital near Inverness) as a meaningful social space. Drawing on archival evidence and combined with contemporary patient and staff voices, the contested meanings of this institution are discussed. In particular, patient narratives reveal both positive and negative assessments of internal and external asylum spaces. Changing feelings about the asylum are argued to be related to matters of geography, and are conceived in terms of distance from and proximity to the institution.     

The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin

Asylum policies in Britain and in the countries of its EU partners are failing to cope with the demands made upon them. With migration pressures mounting and opportunities for legal immigration to many EU states restricted, larger numbers of potential migrants are turning to alternative means of entry and access, namely irregular migration and asylum channels. The responses of states to these challenges have been to adopt more restrictive policies and practices that have considerably changed the balance between immigration control and refugee protection. While states have the right to control entry and enforce their borders, the restrictive measures that have come to dominate policy-making and recent immigration enforcement initiatives in Britain and its European partners do not sufficiently discriminate between asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants, thereby failing to safeguard the right of refugees to seek protection. Current British proposals to move asylum seekers to 'safe areas' in regions of origin fail to understand the burdens, pressures and priorities of countries in the regions, fail to ensure effective protection for those in need, and are unlikely to deliver the UK policy objective of substantially reducing the numbers of illegal entries to Britain. What is needed is an approach that reduces the number of individuals seeking protection in Europe while maintaining the European tradition of providing asylum to those in genuine need. The 'missing link' in asylum policy that would respond both to the concerns of states and to the protection needs of refugees is more comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin. It is in this way that western asylum countries, including the UK, may best address the challenge of providing international protection to victims of persecution and respond to their own concerns about asylum.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

物流地理学研究内容与趋势评述

在对物流地理学产生的基础学科交通地理学、物流管理学研究综述基础上,分析交通地理学、物流管理学与物流地理学在研究目的、领域与方法等方面的联系与差异,阐明物流地理学研究对象、内容与方法,进而提出我国物流地理学的发展方向:现代物流区域效应研究、基于现代物流的经济组织空间结构再造及内在机理研究、产业与大型企业物流网络空间优化模型研究、区域物流体系规划研究。     

Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene

The geography of music has recently turned to questions of embodiment and materiality to account for the sensuous specificity of music. Extending this work, this article emphasizes the constitutive work that embodied experience of music and space does for social differences such as race and gender. It criticizes what is perceived as a limited conception of embodiment in non-representational theory. Using ethnographic evidence from the rave tourism scene in Goa, India, it is argued that precisely during the scene's most mystical and hedonistic moments (what will be called the ‘morning phase’), racial dynamics are at their starkest. It is crucial to understand that racial difference is emergent and not automatic. The article then suggests a Deleuzian musicology which conceives music not as form, language or ideology, but as force. Accounting for the richness of musical materiality involves examining the networks of power and inequality through which it necessarily operates.     

Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe: undocumented Pentecostal Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona

Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocumented Brazilian migrants who attend Pentecostal churches, this article argues that contemporary European transformations of citizenship regimes influence religious perceptions of dwelling and movement within Europe and current experiences of urban space. The opportunities for undocumented Brazilians that allow them to move or to stay somewhere are dependent on legislation, the functioning of state institutions, the family's origins, and on contingency. In the experience of Brazilian Pentecostal adherents, acquiring legal status, to dwell or to be able to remain mobile within this assemblage of processes is dependent on their relationship with God. This article contributes to discussions in mobility studies and the geography of religion that highlight the need for more attention on mobility and stasis in relation to state actors.     

People,plants and performance: On actor network theory and the material pleasures of the private garden

Actor network theory has received considerable attention within geography. In this paper I suggest that geographers have looked at these ideas in a particular way and that this can be productively complemented by an excursion into the contemporary private garden. Through exploring the ways in which people and plants live together there, some geographical criticisms of a defined actor network theory no longer seem to necessarily apply to a more diffuse set of actor network ideas. Furthermore, these ideas can also provide a productive means of engaging practically with the material presence of things, insofar as this materiality is important in the constitution of human cultural experience.     

Passing Online Exams

Many controversial subjects characterize geography in the 21st century. Issues such as climate change, sustainability and social exclusion generate much discussion and often involve clear differences in opinion of how they might be addressed. Higher education is an important space for critical engagement with challenging issues. Preparing for and participating in debates enables students to develop critical thinking skills, alongside a variety of oral presentation and discussion skills. This paper reflects on the potential for teaching through debate in geography. The arguments are illustrated through a debate about whether asylum seekers should be allowed to work in the UK.     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

论我国文化地理学研究的前沿走向

基于研究历史及主要学科成绩的回顾,文章考察了我国文化地理学研究现状中学科性质定位、研究内容拓展以及研究手段、方法的变革等问题。认为我国文化地理学今后应该在科学的文化哲学的指导下加强学科理论的研究,充分吸收相关学科的研究成果,在加强渗透研究的同时突出地理科学的特色与优势;为了学科的良性循环和对地理学的发展做出自身贡献,还必须紧跟时代的步伐,强化学科在文化宣传与舆论导向的理性化、科学化,特别是在区域开发、旅游与城市规划、国家(地区)管理、民族政策制定等方面的应用功效。     

Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal

This paper considers how discretion, understood as both a capacity to make decisions and a form of influence that is often hidden, operates within the accommodation and support of asylum seekers. Combining critical discussions of discretion with accounts of a ‘local turn’ in migration policy, I argue that discretion plays a key role in shaping how policy is implemented and offers insight into the changing governance of asylum at national and local levels. Drawing on empirical material examining the development of the UK's asylum dispersal system, the paper extends accounts of discretion beyond ‘street-level’ to argue for a focus on how discretion reflects different claims to institutional authority. Addressing four accounts of discretion in dispersal, I argue that tracing discretion can offer insights into how ‘implementation gaps’ in asylum policy are negotiated and how tensions between national and local governments are contained. Tracing discretion in this way may advance critical interrogations of power relations in welfare bureaucracies and develop understandings of institutional agency and influence within liberal democracies.     

国外交通地理学研究的知识图谱与进展

交通地理学作为人文地理学的重要分支,一直充满着活力与多样性,获得人文地理学者的广泛关注。本文基于CiteSpace可视化软件,采用Web of Science中收录1982-2014年的4840篇交通地理学论文作为原始数据,梳理了近30年的研究脉络,绘制了学科发展的知识图谱,系统地归纳了学科的研究热点与发展趋势,以期为中国交通地理学研究提供借鉴。研究发现:国外交通地理学研究方法和研究内容日趋多元化,研究视角趋向微观化,质性研究突显;初步形成城市规划学派、理论地理学派、时间地理学派等六大学术共同体;出现社会、行为、文化和流动的诸多转向,呈现出人本导向、信息导向和交叉化的发展趋势。