The project will explore ways in which borders and migration are produced, governed, experienced, imagined, contested and/or transformed through affective practices. Over the last years we have witnessed an increasing political, discursive and legislative criminalisation of migrants and solidarity acts in the UK, Europe and beyond. The research examines the affective and emotional dimension of these criminalisation practices that justify extreme forms of border violence, the wider societal and political frameworks shaping these discourses and policies as well as the role of affect and emotion in debordering and resistance practices.
There has been a growing engagement with the affective and emotional dimension of bordering, migration, race and coloniality across a wide range of disciplines – from Geography to Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sociology, Urban Studies, Critical Border Studies, Black and Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Studies, or other fields in the Social Sciences. The successful candidate is expected to draw upon this developing body of scholarship to develop their own research project within this broad theme.
Possible topics may include:
· Temporal, relational and/or embodied approaches to affective geographies of bordering and migration
· Affective geographies of state discourses: affective practices of fear, anxiety, and other strong emotions, and the normalisation of the violent enforcement of borders, militarised practices and the systemic use of detention
· Affective geographies of debordering and resistance
· Situated and historical examinations of affective geographies of bordering, migration and belonging
· Affective geographies of humanness: how are affective geographies of bordering and migration connected to other more politically normalised forms of institutionalised dehumanisation
· Affective and intergenerational geographies of death
· Relational approaches to bordering, migration and belonging: multidirectional, multispatial, multitemporal, and multispecies theory and practice