Environmental racism at the UK's externalized border in Northern France
About the Event
Border policing increasingly pollutes natural environments: life sustaining ecologies are destroyed or made "hostile" specifically for irregularized migrants. This violence against people and the places they move through attempts to sustain the racialized segregation of humanity throughout the world, leading some critical scholars to consider borders as examples of environmental racism.
This seminar presents a reading of the United Kingdom's externalized border in Northern France through this lens. It will focus on three elements - the sea, the land and the air - showing how, through becoming entangled with exclusionary policies, each has become implicated with injury and death at the border.
Questions which arise, and which we hope to address together, include: how do political and social environments of racism interact with natural environments in borderland geographies; what is the relationship between direct state violence against people migrating and the places they inhabit whilst on the move; how can movements for environmental, mobility, and racial justice be brought together to challenge the environmental racism of borders?
Travis Van Isacker is senior research associate at the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Sociodigital Futures and fellow of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. His current research is on the transformation of border infrastructures through new digital technologies in the UK and Europe. Previously, he was lecturer in criminology at the University of Brighton, UK where he completed his Ph.D. on the eviction and destructions of migrants' homes in Calais, France.