Sharing public space across difference: attunement and the contested burdens of choreographing encounter

This paper concerns how claims to public space are negotiated between differently embodied subjects, and how forms of bodily articulation shape capacities for sharing space. Drawing on a study of outdoor access practices, entailing mobile video ethnographies with walkers and cyclists, it explores the corporeal mechanisms through which the entitlements of differently mobile subjects are asserted, resisted, circumscribed or accepted in the time-spaces of bodily encounter. How the signalling of ‘responsible’ and ‘irresponsible’ conduct influences how bodies are allowed to move in relation to other bodies is the focus. Mobilisations of speed, affective and sensory attunement, and techniques of bodily articulation, were found to be a key in the disciplining of cycling and walking bodies. This paper highlights the central role of attunement to, and concession of, hybrid subjectivity in the choreography of encounters, and, moreover, how related burdens of orchestrating coexistence are shared and struggled over amongst different publics. It demonstrates that whilst greater attunement can enable differently mobile subjects to develop a reciprocal choreography, expectations of such attunement can also undermine the ability to share space if not met. This paper thus raises the dilemma of when to accept or extend the limits of attunement in facilitating coexistence in public space.     

Local press,dispersal and community in the construction of asylum debates

How has the prominent and contentious international issue of asylum been debated at a local level; what local variations are there and why? This paper presents analysis of local newspapers and interviews with press workers for Cardiff and Leeds, two UK case study locations that have received asylum seekers through the dispersal policy. The case studies show that asylum is framed and constructed differently by the local press in different places with implications for reactions to asylum seekers and community cohesion. The relations between local press and community are explored as explanations for varying discourses. It is found that the way the local press represents and constructs local identity sets the framework for reactions to dispersal; and that the operation of the local press within local networks of power and information shapes the extent to which established discourses can be challenged. For Cardiff, the localising of asylum through the dispersal policy created an opportunity for local negotiation of difference in the context of the national moral panic on asylum.     

Family,community and the Victorian asylum: a case study of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum and its pauper lunatics

Abstract

This article explores how the medicalization of poverty in 19th-century aetiologies of insanity provided the basis for which the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum became an option for the relief and treatment of the poor. It is argued that the poor, their communities and poor law officials, by being key to the process of committal, were partially responsible for the asylum population and the role that the asylum played in the local community. The article explores how important poverty was in asylum admissions and, from an analysis of the length of stay of those entering the asylum, the number of patients for whom the asylum provided short-term respite. Using case histories of patients, the article argues for the asylum to be seen as part of the poor law process that discriminated between the deserving and undeserving poor.     

‘ALL HIS WAYS ARE THOSE OF AN IDIOT’: THE ADMISSION,TREATMENT OF AND SOCIAL REACTION TO TWO ‘IDIOT’ CHILDREN OF THE NORTHAMPTON PAUPER LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1877–1883

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a case study of the patient case notes of two boys admitted to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum in the late 1870s. This case study is intended to provide a flavour of the asylum experience for two boys; John Wenborn aged 6 and Charles Luddington, aged 7, both deemed idiots and both removed to the county asylum. Although, the focus on two individuals provides a narrow case study their experiences will provide a window through which to analyse much broader themes such as, the changing social relationships taking place in Victorian Northamptonshire and the impact of the family in securing admission to a pauper lunatic asylum. This analysis will be set against a backdrop of the discussion of the practical uses of the asylum in the late nineteenth century and perceptions of the asylum within the community. This article will examine the mechanisms used to deal with children deemed unfit for ‘normal’ society, the experience and treatment of the children while residents of the asylum and the social response towards insane children within the wider community.     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

Veiled Meanings: Young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences [1]

This article draws upon in-depth discussions conducted with young British Muslim women to explore the ways in which embodied differences are negotiated in the construction and contestation of identity. The author argues that dress is an overdetermined signifier for Muslim women, illustrating the role of clothing, particularly the veil, in the discursive formation of 'Muslim women'. The author explores some of the possibilities for reworking dress to create alternative femininities within different spaces, focusing in particular on the construction of 'hybrid' identities and the articulation of 'new' Muslim identities.     

Television documentary,history and memory. An analysis of Sergio Zavoli's The Gardens of Abel

This article examines a celebrated documentary made for Italian state TV in 1968 and transmitted in 1969 to an audience of millions. The programme – The Gardens of Abel – looked at changes introduced by the radical psychiatrist Franco Basaglia in an asylum in the north-east of Italy (Gorizia). The article examines the content of this programme for the first time, questions some of the claims that have been made for it, and outlines the sources used by the director, Sergio Zavoli. The article argues that the film was as much an expression of Zavoli's vision and ideas as it was linked to those of Franco Basaglia himself. Finally, the article highlights the way that this programme has become part of historical discourse and popular memory.     

On the Temptations of Sovereignty: The Task of Catholic Social Teaching and the Challenge of UK Asylum Seeking

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the main tenets of Catholic social teaching as they relate to the politics of asylum in a UK context. Addressing the multilayered and complex crisis of confidence and asylum seekers with regard the moral performance of the UK system, this article proposes that the significance of CST's contribution to public discourse has been heightened by three key shifts in state practice. While the constructive contours of this teaching are explored, to be of service to forced migrants CST itself requires a deeper understanding of and engagement with the political cultures that shape practices of democratic exclusion. To this end the conclusion proposes two areas for further dialogue between CST and asylum experience.     

Vallejo and the End of History

This article studies the intersections of racial, gender, and national subjectivities in Marta Rojas's novel, Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1998). I examine the entanglement of fiction and historical memory as well as the (re)appropriation and (re)construction of the slave experience as a vindication of anti-imperialist discourses. By focusing on the depictions of conflicts of race and class set in the colonial period, I also analyze the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento (racial and cultural whitening) and the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, I maintain that this novel contributes to the intellectual articulation of new forms of racialization in the Cuban context, while confronting the traditional rhetoric of White supremacy.     

Containing Kassindja: detention,gendered threats and border control in the United States

In 1996, the USA issued a landmark decision to grant political asylum to a young woman, Fauziya Kassindja, due to the threat of forced genital circumcision. The case, Matter of Kasinga, is now a cornerstone in the area of law known as ‘gender-based asylum.’ While the legal victory occurred during a watershed moment for women’s human rights, it also spawned considerable critique for reproducing colonial tropes of third-world women, cultural backwardness, and narratives of rescue. This article offers another perspective by examining key phases of the case that predate the final decision. I demonstrate how logics of containment shaped the case trajectory and outcome. Initially, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) sought to contain Kassindja as a bogus asylum seeker through detention. However, once a powerful advocacy campaign exposed the violence of detention, the INS shifted their containment strategies to safeguarding the legal paradigm and circumscribing its legacy as a precedent-setting case. By focusing on the role of detention and the logics of containment, this article supplements cultural critiques of the case and provides an example of how gender and gender violence can be leveraged by state agencies and actors to reinforce border control and manage refugee/asylee populations.     

Governmental mobility: The power effects of the movement of detained asylum seekers around Britain's detention estate

This paper explores the ways in which mobility can have governmental effects in the context of the management of asylum seekers awaiting deportation from the UK. Drawing upon the case of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, a facility for the incarceration of immigration deportees near Oxford, the paper makes the case that the way asylum seekers are moved between detention centres within the UK has implications for the way they are represented to both asylum activists and asylum sector employees, causing them to choose to use their influence differently by with-holding the support that they might otherwise provide. The constant moving and repositioning of asylum seekers means that they are depicted as transitory, fleeting and depersonalised to those actors with the greatest degree of influence over them. The subjection not only of asylum seekers through forceful, blunt forms of power, but also of more powerful asylum sector actors through subtler, governmental techniques, has significant material implications for the incarcerated asylum seeking community that populates Britain's detention estate.     

The Liberal Paradox and the Politics of Asylum in Australia

This article interprets the politics of asylum in Australia in light of what James Hollifield calls ‘the liberal paradox’; that is, the trend amongst contemporary states towards greater transnational open-ness in the economic arena alongside growing pressure for domestic political closure. It begins with an outline of Australia's recent history of economic reform and of the discourse of globalisation that has been employed to legitimise the changes wrought by this transition. Focusing on the period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the article provides an account of anxieties associated with these changes and an analysis of government strategies to secure the support of disaffected sections of the electorate. Asylum policy is analysed in this context. The article shows how the policing of asylum seekers constitutes performances of political closure designed to assuage those made vulnerable by Australia's neoliberal economic trajectory. It argues that these politics of asylum are indicative of the tensions between transnational engagement and territorial closure faced by neoliberal states more generally.     

Care as mundane politics: contested familial refugee lives in Finland

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to draw from and manage their transnational family lives poorly recognized and supported. In result, refugees may end up in paradoxical subject positions of having to give up and take responsibility for their families, with their own experiences and understanding of familial life remaining secondary. These contradictions are heightened when familial concerns are among the reasons for seeking asylum, involving caring and uncaring relations. In this article, we analyze familiality as a form of mundane care politics in refugee situations, based on our study with asylum seekers and refugees in Finland.     

Historical duty,palimpsestic time and migration in the Decade of Centenaries

Abstract

This article analyses Sonya Kelly’s How to Keep an Alien (Dublin Tiger Fringe, 2014) and ANU Production’s Vardo (Dublin Theatre Festival, 2014) in relationship to the performative backdrop of the Irish Decade of Centenaries (2012–22) and a series of key extra-theatrical political events have that featured asylum seekers and migrants prominently in Ireland and to a limited extent in Europe at large from 2012 to 2015. Both theatrical productions centrally engage tropes of Irish national memory vis-à-vis engagement with migration through a primary focus on women’s stories and premiered against the backdrop of the Decade of Centenaries. How to Keep an Alien and Vardo’s embrace of what M. Jacqui Alexander terms “palimpsestic time” and their critical focus on gender during this moment of the Decade of Centenaries models a theatrical dramaturgy that aids in reading key theatrical and extra-theatrical events featuring asylum seekers and migrants against one another. These works reveal the relationship between these events and the ongoing redefinition of Irish national memory and political community, a process thrown into sharp relief by the present commemorative mode. They insist that a turn to the past is inseparable from querying the lived political structures of the present, structures that have repeatedly displaced as well as instrumentalised the bodies of migrant women from the post-inward migration of the mid-1990s onwards.     

Reframing belonging: affective localism and the early fiction of Reino Rinne

The early fiction of a novelist and journalist born in the north of Finland, Reino Rinne (1913–2002), is illustrative of the post-war interest in a redefinition of cultural belonging. The aim of this article is to offer a reading of Rinne’s works that throws light on the way they exemplify a post-war articulation of affective localism. What is especially characteristic of the affective localism produced in Rinne’s early fiction is the deployment of certain narrative elements, realism as an aesthetic regime, tropes of spatial belonging and historical myths that are endowed with affective charge. A comparison between Rinne's first novel Tunturit hymyilevät. Kuvaus Lapista 1900-luvun alkuvuosilta ([1945a]. The Fells are Smiling. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), and his collection of short stories Erämaan omia ihmisiä ([1949]. People of the Wilderness. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), reveals that there was a change in Rinne’s artistic practice. While Rinne’s first novel revolved around a promise of reciprocity and happiness, the collection of short stories shows the dissolution of the optimism that, according to Berlant [(2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], is at the core of all attachments.     

‘Staying active’ in confined living conditions: participation assessments of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) in the Netherlands†

This article contributes to the critical literature on child participation discussing the positionings of young asylum seekers (aged 12–23) residing in a Dutch asylum centre. It queries participation as an institutional measure, outlining the informants’ perspectives on the creation of a youth council within the confines of an asylum centre. Contradictions and tensions in the wider societal context, in the asylum centre, and in the functioning of the youth council are identified. They demonstrate the gulf between theory and practice in the fulfilment of children's participation rights. The authors scrutinize concepts such as ‘methodological immaturity’, ‘voice’, and ‘recognition’ and argue for the integration of the perceptions and practices of young asylum seekers through dialogue. This can assist in creating an atmosphere conducive to an ethically responsible and meaningful collaboration with young asylum seekers and adapted policy interventions to enhance participation against an on-going backdrop of insecurity, exclusion, and forced inactivity.     

BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville's over-life-sized paintings and the ‘morpho-logics’ of fat,female bodies

Recent work in geography on materiality and embodiment has drawn attention to the ways that the varied materials of bodies, their capacities to leak and flow, to grow and shrink and endure and disappear, are central to an understanding of the spatialities of bodily experience. This article seeks to contribute to this work by considering how bodies touch themselves, or what I have termed ‘intra-body touching’, through an interrogation of two over-life-sized paintings (Branded and Propped) by the artist Jenny Saville. Her paintings present the topographies of a female fleshy body through detailed observations of bodily surfaces and orifices which include breasts hanging, hands grabbing and fat rolling and pressing upon itself. In drawing upon Luce Irigaray's critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty's account of hands touching, the article seeks to utilise her notion of the mucous for highlighting the ‘morpho-logics’ of sexed and sized bodies as they are produced through the example of intra-body touching. A focus upon the embodied spatialities of intra-body touching challenges accounts of the female body that centre upon women being located in a position of estrangement and distance from its varied materialities. Instead it will suggest that Saville's bodies are centred upon distinctly geographical relations of proximity and intimacy in ways which surprise and challenge our understandings of what a fleshy body can do.     

From “refugee” to “migrant” in Calais solidarity activism: Re-staging undocumented migration for a future politics of asylum

The framing of issues of migration and clandestine travel in the European Union are tied up with a historically-specific ethos towards the outsider, which, after philosopher Jacques Rancière, I term a “count”. The count shaping the interventions of contemporary advocacy and humanitarian groups derives from conceptions of ethics rooted in political modernity, and – for Rancière – are also responsible for foreclosing disruptive appearances of equality. In practice, postures of compassion towards the refugee convert expressions of vocal dissent into matters for moral sympathy. In this paper I explore the implications of this claim for a future politics of asylum, focussing on moments of interruption to an underlying count. I suggest that the staging of the situation of undocumented migrants in Calais through the figure of the migrant rather than the refugee demonstrates a recasting of activism as a form of political listening rather than political speech – in this sense the interventions of anarchistic network No Borders reflect a call for a continuous “recount” of the situation, over an affirmation of a particular framing of the situation. In some ways this call remains problematic, sometimes reframing the voices of local people and migrants according to an external vision of politics. Nevertheless, I hold that this denaturalisation of compassionate hospitality as the only ethical response to asylum is useful in the broader terrain of political dissent, and points to the importance of embodied habit as a locus for enduring social transformations.     

Living in a ‘free jail’: Asylum seekers' and local residents' experiences of discomfort with asylum seeker accommodation

This paper shows how asylum seeker accommodation produces a politics of discomfort among both asylum seekers as well as local residents. The paper compares two collective asylum centres located in the city of Augsburg, Germany, one of which is a nationally renowned refugee integration project, the ‘Grandhotel Cosmopolis’, the other, a state-run asylum centre. Data was obtained through participant observation and semi-structured interviews between September 2016 and November 2017. Drawing on carceral geographies, the paper identifies three mechanisms through which the material and institutional standards of asylum accommodation generate discomfort among and between asylum seekers and local residents, which are self-mortification, depersonalization and role-breakdown. Through the sharing of rooms and facilities, asylum accommodation contributes to asylum seekers' self-mortification, referring to changes in the conceptions and beliefs of oneself. The comparison of the two cases highlights how large asylum centres depersonalize asylum seekers by creating images of a homogenized ‘mass’ and contribute to role-breakdown, meaning a reduction of individuals' identities performed with regard to work, home or family life. National discourses of asylum seekers as dangerous merged with the space of asylum accommodation, thereby preventing social interaction ‘as neighbours’ between asylum seekers and local residents. Overall, the paper exposes how a politics of discomfort utilizes affect as a governmental device, thereby turning asylum accommodation into a carceral space by creating social distance and ‘moral closure’.     

La revolución minera asturiana de 1934 en Melania Jacoby,de Susana Pérez Alonso: Un conflicto individual de proyecciones universales

Susana Pérez Alonso's novel Melania Jacoby proposes two levels of meaning: on the one hand, it deals with what it means to be Asturian and its social rebelliousness, and the visible traces left in the history of the region by the Asturian revolution of 1934 as well; on the other hand, the novel can be read as a universal metaphor of two forces in conflict: the untamed Nature (represented by the sea, the fields, and the coal mines) and the efforts by men to subjugate it and put it at the service of the Asturian bourgeoisie and the incipient power of the franquists. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the figure of Melania Jacoby, a woman who transgresses the hegemonic order in terms of class and gender, acts as a point of articulation and dialogue between those conflicting forces and constitutes an “interstitial space,” a border, and a place of resistance for the marginalized people (the women, the persecuted, and the poor).