Happy holidays

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

from Mary Bosworth

As we close down for our holiday break, it feels important to reflect on the achievements of this term and look forward with hope to the new year.  There is no doubt we are living through difficult times. But fear and pessimism are unlikely to get us out of this situation. And those of us in Border Criminologies have many reasons to be thankful and motivated, not least the simple experience of working together -- even though we are often geographically distant -- on shared pursuits and aspirations.  

I am heartened by the amount of effort and creativity that is underway to understand and challenge the criminalisation of border control and mobility.  I am also pleased that the website and our blog in particular continues to be an accessible outlet for people’s work and experiences. I’m sure we all need a break.  But also I know that academic work remains vital for challenging current practices and ideologies. So, too, are the efforts of numerous NGOs, and lawyers and individuals who resist.  So take a break, because your energies will be needed in the new year!

News from Oxford

This term has been a busy one for Border Criminologies in Oxford and further afield. We have organised and participated in events in the UK and abroad, and our research team has been involved in ongoing fieldwork. 

We have been particularly pleased to welcome a series of visitors to Oxford this term, many of whom have also given research talks. Anthea Vogl, from University of Technology, Sydney, discussed ‘Crimmigration and Refugees in Australia’ in October. Her talk can be heard here. She was followed up in November by Gabriella Sanchez who spoke about ‘Rethinking ‘Smuggling’ in Libya’.  Her talk can be heard here.

We learned from Julie Ham, about her community-based project in Hong Kong with Philippino domestic workers, in which she is developing new, visual methods.  We also heard from Cecilia Vergagno about her work on border crossing facilitation at the Franco-Italian border. Dorina Damsa and Giulia Raimondo have contributed to DPhil discussion groups.

This term we ran, for the third time, the Border Criminologies dissertation Prize. As ever, the competition was strong and the topics wide-ranging. The winner (Bill De La Rosa) and runner-up (Samuel Singler) received £200 and £100 worth of Routledge books. You can read their excellent dissertations, here and here. Stay tuned for next year’s call!   

A GROUP OF MIGRANTS DEPORTED AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER (PHOTO: BILL DE LA ROSA)

In November we welcomed Juliet Stumpf as a new Co-Director and Katja Franko as a new Associate Director. We have also been joined by Claudia McHardy, who is a student editor and by Bill De La Rosa, who is a Spanish language Editor and regional contributor.  Andriani Fili is currently on maternity leave and has been replaced by Sanja Milivojevic who is supported by Elspeth Windsor.  We say goodbye to Vanessa Barker, who is stepping down from her role as Associate Director and joining the Advisory Board.

That month we also launched a slightly redesigned Border Criminologies website, which allows a greater number of projects to be listed and also to be linked to external websites. Please do get in touch if you would like to have your research profiled.

The Blog

Our blog continues to be widely read and attracts an international audience from more than 170 countries. Only this term the blog was viewed 50,328 times. We published 33 new posts, including five book reviews and two themed series; one on dignity and immigration and another ‘from the field’ series, on how research changes over time. You can read this term’s 5 most-read posts here, here, here, here and here. Next year we will be publishing more posts from our Border Criminologies network and themed series on the Italian immigration detention system and humanitarian search and rescue operations. We will also run more ‘from the field’ posts with contributors from around the world reporting about their fieldwork experiences. Stay tuned and get in touch if you want to contribute to the blog.

Publishing Updates

Our members have produced a number of scholarly outputs. Mary Bosworth had an article accepted with Marion Vannier on the detention and deportation of asylum seekers in France and Britain. Read it here on online first. 

Together with  Hindpal Singh Bhui, and Andriani Fili, Mary also published a report ‘Monitoring Immigration Detention at the Borders of Europe’ in November on material from an ongoing collaborative project on human rights monitoring in detention in Greece and Turkey. Funded through an ESRC-Impact Acceleration Account grant, this project has commenced in 2016. 

The report describes the second phase of the project, where members of the team visited detention facilities in both countries and spent a considerable amount of time with the National Preventive Mechanisms. They also delivered training and convened a workshop on detention monitoring. As part of the project, Greek and Turkish detention monitors attended inspections in England conducted by HM Inspectorate of Prisons, which is part of the UK NPM, to support joint learning and collaboration between monitoring bodies. 

In October, Peter Mancina published the article 'Investigating and (Not) Disciplining Violations of Sanctuary City Laws" in the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal. This article examines every documented police violation of sanctuary city laws in San Francisco, California - instances when local police have attempted to enforce United States federal immigration laws or have discriminated against individuals on the basis of immigration status. The article concludes that police management addresses such violations with largely insignificant and inconsequential disciplinary action. The full article can be downloaded here.

This term, Sanja Milivojevic published Border policing and Security Technologies: Mobility and Proliferation of Borders in the Western Balkans, with Routledge. 

Katja Franko published a new book The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power (Routledge 2019). The book examines these processes and outlines how the figure of the "crimmigrant other" has emerged not only as a central object of media and political discourse, but also as a distinct penal subject connecting migration and the logic of criminalization and insecurity. Illegality defines not only a quality of certain acts, but becomes an existential condition, which shapes the daily lives of large groups within the society.

Research updates

Mary Bosworth and Andriani Fili are developing, together with the Greek Council for Refugees, the first ‘know your rights’ tool, for detainees in Greece, a document that, we hope, will be distributed in all sites of detention with links to further information. 

As part of this project we will also soon be launching an interactive map, the landscapes of border control, which aims to visualise what goes on in detention centres in Greece and Italy in order to increase public access to knowledge about immigration and the treatment of immigrants in detention settings. 

A SCREENSHOT OF LANDSCAPES OF BORDER CONTROL MAP

The material disseminated through this platform draws on a large set of data obtained over different time periods and under a range of diverse projects and long-term engagement with civil society organisations. It is specifically designed to offer a platform to civil society organisations, solidarity groups, (ex) detainees and the public to communicate their experiences from detention.  

This term, Alpa Parmar organised and presented a panel on Police, Citizens and the State at the American Society of Criminology in November in San Francisco, which included papers from BC members - Vanessa Barker and Ana Aliverti as well as Layla Skinns and Angela Sorsby. Alongside continuing gathering data for her research on the use of police intelligence in immigration hearings in London, Alpa also published a paper 'Arresting (non)citizenship: the policing migration nexus of nationality, race and criminalization' in Theoretical Criminology and participated in a symposium Children and Imprisonment at Doughty Street Chambers in December. 

Maartje van der Woude’s 5-year project ‘Getting to the Core of Crimmigration: Assessing the Role of Discretion in Intra-Schengen Cross-border Management’ entered its third year, a year in which both PhD’s working on the project finished their data collection in Germany and in Poland. While focusing on understanding the local dialectics of migration control in a border region in Germany, Neske Baerwaldt conducted a large number of in depth interviews with local residents – migrants, NGO workers and local state representatives. Maryla Klajn finshed a period of 5 months in the field with the Polish Border Guards during which she observed their decision-making processes in performing intra-Schengen ‘crimmigration’ stops. In getting a better picture of the different ways in which European member states are currently policing their borders, Maartje was able to send out a query through the European Migration Network, which resulted in an interesting overview of the ‘patchwork’ of bordering practices in the Schengen area. The first findings of the project at large were discussed in the two-day seminar ‘The Freedom of Movement in Intra-Schengen Border Areas: Challenges & Opportunities’  held on December 10 & 11 in The Hague. Scholars and practitioners from the countries that are included in “Getting to the Core of Crimmigration” as well as in “Dealing with Human Trafficking and Human Smuggling in intra-Schengen Border Areas: Enhancing compassion by uncovering the fifty shades of grey” came together to discuss some of the challenges that they face in their daily practices or that they had observed in their research.

This year Gabriella Sanchez wrapped up a project on the facilitation of migrant journeys in Libya and Tunisia. The study sought to identify the interactions of migrants with the people facilitating their journeys amidst increasing pressures from the EU to contain irregular migration from Africa and stepped-up migration enforcement on the ground. She presented the preliminary findings (which raised visibility over the roles women and children perform in the practice) during the All Souls lecture series in November.  She has also continued her collaborative project with teenagers with a history of involvement in border crossing facilitation along the US Mexico border. The group has documented their experiences using rap and will be releasing their second song, Sueño, in the new year. Alongside Luigi Achilli, she also published Critical Insights on Irregular Migration Facilitation: Global Perspectives, which brings together contributions from critical scholars working on migrant journeys around the world.

Peter Mancina recently completed a book writing fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, Sweden where he completed five chapters for his book Sanctuary City in the Age of Mass Deportation. As part of SCAS' Global Horizons program, he also gave a public seminar titled "Governance After the End of Borders" in which he used the case study of sanctuary cities in the United States to think through how governance could function at the local level if national borders and national citizenship were abolished throughout the world. The full seminar video can be viewed here.

Sanja Milivojevic signed a contract for a new book called Crime and punishment in the Future Internet: Digital Frontier technologies and Criminology in the 21st century (Routledge, 2020). She also participated at the 6th International Conference on crime observation and criminal analysis in Brussels, Belgium and was instrumental in establishing Science and Technology Studies Migration Technology Network, a multidisciplinary network that looks into the technology-migration nexus.  

Vicky Canning published findings from a two year ESRC project in Reimagining Refugee Rights: Addressing Asylum Harms in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, which can be freely accessed here: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2019/mar/uk-dk-se-reimagining-refugee-rights-asylum-harms-3-19.pdf. She presented her findings across 16 invited public lectures in five countries. Vicky also acted as keynote at the British Society of Criminology (alongside David Whyte) as well as co-convening the 47th Annual Conference for the Study of Deviance and Social Control in Barcelona. She is continuing work on two books which will be published in 2020.

Regional Partners

In 2019, Border Criminologies’ regional partner, the Border Crossing Observatory facilitated discussions with colleagues from Last Rights on protecting and upholding the human rights of migrants in death who have died during their migration journey. BoB Director, Leanne Weber has published various articles and reports from her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship research project. She has just been recognised with co-author Jude McCulloch for one of the most cited articles in Punishment and Society  Journal in 2019 for their article, ‘"Penal power and border control: Which thesis? Sovereignty, governmentality, or the pre-emptive state?”. Managing Director Rebecca Powell, wrote on her PhD research in an Overland article that explores the concept of fairness in the deportation of New Zealander long term residents from Australia under section s501 of the Migration Act (visa cancellation and refusal on character grounds). Meg Randolph completed her confirmation milestone and has recently begun her fieldwork, exploring the movement of Australia’s offshore detention policies. 

In early December, Leanne and Rebecca presented at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology 2019 Conference in Perth on 'enemy crimmigration' in relation to visa cancellation and deportation of 'risky’ non-citizens from Australia, including New Zealanders and refugees. This research is part of an edited collection, featured in their co-authored book chapter titled, 'Crime, pre-crime and sub-crime: Deportation of ‘risky non-citizens’ as ‘enemy crimmigration' in J. Pratt, and J. Anderson, J. (eds) Criminal Justice, Risk and the Revolt against Uncertainty (Palgrave McMillan), due for release in February 2020. To find out more about other exciting things that 2019 involved, see our recently published Highlight Newsletter.

LOOKING AHEAD

In 2020, a series of events in Oxford are planned. On February 5, for instance, we will be welcoming Omid Tofighian to launch Behrouz Boochani’s book, No Friend but the Mountains, along with a film screening. Details to follow shortly.  

In addition, Juliet Stumpf is hosting the 5th Biennial CINETS conference, 'Crimmigration, Capital, and Consequences', at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland Oregan, from September 24 - 26, 2020, in collaboration with Border Criminologies.

As ever, ikf you have ideas for workshops, conference panels, blog posts or research projects. Please get in touch. Working together is vital in the current climate, and resources go further when pooled.

Meanwhile, we wish all our readers and colleagues a happy and peaceful holiday period. Have a rest, because your energies and optimism will be needed. See you in January!