Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HEMIG (Hostile Environments: The Political Ecology of Migration and Border Violence)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31
Across the world, state borders are being increasingly militarised and migrants funnelled into more and more hazardous terrains such as oceans, mountain ranges and deserts. In the last few years alone, several thousands have died while crossing these hostile environments, whose material geographies are harnessed as crucial tools of border control. At the same time, across and beyond urban geographies in the Global North, a generalised atmosphere of hostility has led to shrinking forms of social protection for those classified as outsiders, with legislation passed to deny migrants access to work, housing, services and education.
This project sets out to reframe the notion of “hostile environment”, first introduced in the migration debate in the UK in 2012 to refer to such anti-migrant laws, as a conceptual and analytical lens to capture these distant but interconnected processes, whereby “natural” and civic spaces alike have been weaponised by extractive processes, surveillance technologies, border control practices and bureaucratic protocols. Going beyond the catastrophist and security-oriented perspectives that dominate these debates, HEMIG is developing arts-based strategies of spatial and visual analysis to capture the entangled nature of border and environmental violence and its harmful effects. A multidisciplinary team has been focusing on three border environments located along a typical migrant trajectory linking Sub-Saharan Africa to northern Europe. Using a unique combination of methods (big/small data, high/low tech tools and remote/field research), as well as involving affected communities and partner organisations in each location, the project seeks to introduce new cutting-edge visualisation and mapping techniques to analyse these phenomena. In this way, it also aims to produce new conceptual grounds for rethinking the relation between environment and migration, intervening in public debates on the human and environmental cost of border control.
This project sets out to reframe the notion of “hostile environment”, first introduced in the migration debate in the UK in 2012 to refer to such anti-migrant laws, as a conceptual and analytical lens to capture these distant but interconnected processes, whereby “natural” and civic spaces alike have been weaponised by extractive processes, surveillance technologies, border control practices and bureaucratic protocols. Going beyond the catastrophist and security-oriented perspectives that dominate these debates, HEMIG is developing arts-based strategies of spatial and visual analysis to capture the entangled nature of border and environmental violence and its harmful effects. A multidisciplinary team has been focusing on three border environments located along a typical migrant trajectory linking Sub-Saharan Africa to northern Europe. Using a unique combination of methods (big/small data, high/low tech tools and remote/field research), as well as involving affected communities and partner organisations in each location, the project seeks to introduce new cutting-edge visualisation and mapping techniques to analyse these phenomena. In this way, it also aims to produce new conceptual grounds for rethinking the relation between environment and migration, intervening in public debates on the human and environmental cost of border control.
The project has focused on three different border environments located along a typical migrant trajectory linking Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. Each of these areas constitutes a different kind of “Hostile Environment” and makes it possible to explore a specific theoretical and historical-political facet of this concept.
The first “border environment” comprises two areas in located in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Gambian coastline and the desert border between Niger and Algeria. These areas have been subjected to intensified practices of capitalist extraction that by depleting resources and creating toxic sacrifice zones often lead, in complex and non-linear ways, to displacement. At the same time, long-standing exchange networks and mobilities have been illegalised through European authorities’ border externalisation practices. Work in this area has thus focused on instances in which resource frontiers encounter bordering practices. In Gambia, we have been working with communities and groups affected by overfishing practices and in particular the establishment in recent years of industrial fish meal and fish oil factories along the Gambian coast which are threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities, pushing many to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Working with partners and stakeholders based in Gambia, Spain and elsewhere, the project team is facilitating workshops, creative encounters and a radio show and is producing audio-visual outputs, publications and installations that seek to document and make palpable the effects of these entangled forms of (im-)mobilities. Most recently, we have also started to work on the interconnections between migration, mining economies and border violence along the Niger-Algeria border, focusing on deportation practices in the vicinity of gold mining sites.
In the second “border environment”, research has focused on how border surveillance practices have weapoinsed borders’ material and legal geographies create Hostile Environments. In particular, the team has looked at how, in the Central Mediterranean, aerial surveillance activities by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and others have become a central plank of the EU’s strategy to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe by boat and return them to Libya, where they face widespread abuse and exploitation. Through open-source and forensic methods, data, and image analysis we produced a video that was show at the renowned Venice Art Biennale 2024, as well as a comprehensive installation commissioned by the Festival d’Automne in Paris. This research also led to the publications of a visual “scrollytelling” investigation published in December 2022 in collaboration with the renowned international organisation Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2022/12/08/airborne-complicity-frontex-aerial-surveillance-enables-abuse(opens in new window)). A new, wide-ranging online platforms that will present the results of this research will be published online in the first quarter of 2025.
In the third border environment, the main focus has been the area of Calais, where the project team has been carrying out interviews and various site visits, and is currently focusing on documenting a case of border death which exemplifies how the waterways in this area have been weaponised by dangerous police tactics against migrants trying to embark on small boats to reach the UK.
In addition to these research activities, the project team has also been working on a series of "critical lexicon" events, each extending over several days (the first took place in Bologna between 30 May and 1 June 2024, the second will take place in London between 4 and 7 February 2025, and the third is planned for Autumn 2025) and featuring the participation of various scholars, artists and activists. Through various modes of engagement (scholarly presentations and debates, walks, site visits, performances, screenings, etc.) these events are organised around a set of key terms that are central to the project and that we aim to collectively (re-)define.
An updated record of project outputs and achievements is available on the project website at: https://liminal-lab.org/(opens in new window)
The first “border environment” comprises two areas in located in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Gambian coastline and the desert border between Niger and Algeria. These areas have been subjected to intensified practices of capitalist extraction that by depleting resources and creating toxic sacrifice zones often lead, in complex and non-linear ways, to displacement. At the same time, long-standing exchange networks and mobilities have been illegalised through European authorities’ border externalisation practices. Work in this area has thus focused on instances in which resource frontiers encounter bordering practices. In Gambia, we have been working with communities and groups affected by overfishing practices and in particular the establishment in recent years of industrial fish meal and fish oil factories along the Gambian coast which are threatening the livelihoods of coastal communities, pushing many to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Working with partners and stakeholders based in Gambia, Spain and elsewhere, the project team is facilitating workshops, creative encounters and a radio show and is producing audio-visual outputs, publications and installations that seek to document and make palpable the effects of these entangled forms of (im-)mobilities. Most recently, we have also started to work on the interconnections between migration, mining economies and border violence along the Niger-Algeria border, focusing on deportation practices in the vicinity of gold mining sites.
In the second “border environment”, research has focused on how border surveillance practices have weapoinsed borders’ material and legal geographies create Hostile Environments. In particular, the team has looked at how, in the Central Mediterranean, aerial surveillance activities by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and others have become a central plank of the EU’s strategy to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe by boat and return them to Libya, where they face widespread abuse and exploitation. Through open-source and forensic methods, data, and image analysis we produced a video that was show at the renowned Venice Art Biennale 2024, as well as a comprehensive installation commissioned by the Festival d’Automne in Paris. This research also led to the publications of a visual “scrollytelling” investigation published in December 2022 in collaboration with the renowned international organisation Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2022/12/08/airborne-complicity-frontex-aerial-surveillance-enables-abuse(opens in new window)). A new, wide-ranging online platforms that will present the results of this research will be published online in the first quarter of 2025.
In the third border environment, the main focus has been the area of Calais, where the project team has been carrying out interviews and various site visits, and is currently focusing on documenting a case of border death which exemplifies how the waterways in this area have been weaponised by dangerous police tactics against migrants trying to embark on small boats to reach the UK.
In addition to these research activities, the project team has also been working on a series of "critical lexicon" events, each extending over several days (the first took place in Bologna between 30 May and 1 June 2024, the second will take place in London between 4 and 7 February 2025, and the third is planned for Autumn 2025) and featuring the participation of various scholars, artists and activists. Through various modes of engagement (scholarly presentations and debates, walks, site visits, performances, screenings, etc.) these events are organised around a set of key terms that are central to the project and that we aim to collectively (re-)define.
An updated record of project outputs and achievements is available on the project website at: https://liminal-lab.org/(opens in new window)
The research conducted so far has seen the development of a new interdisciplinary approach. The team has been mobilising novel digital tools to create online platforms, exhibitions, videos, radio programs and publications that extend the forensic work that I had been engaging previously in novel directions. For instance, in the context of the work in the Gambia, the team has produced a video documenting the impact of fishmeal factories on coastal communities though geospatial and 3D technologies; a radio show to which we have invited important project stakeholders to participated and which has served both as research and as public engagement activity; and creative workshops with local communities that will result in a children’s publication, a podcast and an exhibition. While each of these activities are not entirely novel in themselves, their layering and articulation across different research products and public engagement activities is certainly experimental in nature and aim to target diverse audiences through unconventional means.