Mobile Borders and Urban Landscapes
Navigating the Boundaries of Belonging
In this four-part miniseries, we spoke with six scholars whose research addresses different aspects, geographies, and approaches to analyzing and understanding the relationship between migration and urban politics and culture. After introducing our guests for the series, this episode works through the concept of the border as a mobile entity that carries very real and concrete implications.
We could have created an entire show focused on this topic! But instead, we’re taking a wide-angled and ecumenical approach to general topics in urban studies. We hope to expose scholars, students, and practitioners of urban studies to diverse research methods and approaches to these themes. Each episode will be accompanied by a suggested reading list based on our discussions, and we welcome suggestions for future guests and topics!
Guests
Andrew Baldwin, Durham University
Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Yale University
Nancy Hiemstra, Stony Brook University (SUNY)
David Kaufmann, ETH Zürich
Domenic Vitiello, University of Pennsylvania
Reading List
Andrew Baldwin. 2022. The Other of Climate Change: Racial Futurism, Migration, Humanism. Rowman and Littlefield.
Andrew Baldwin and Bruce Erickson. 2020. Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 3-11.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe (guest editors). 2019. Anthropocene mobilities. Mobilities 14(3), special issue.
Andrew Baldwin, Christiane Fröhlich, Delf Rothe. 2019. From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate. Mobilities 14(3): 289-297.
Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini. 2017. Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration. Critique.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. How subcontracting key services leads to the entrenchment of urban immigration detention in many us communities. American Politics and Policy Blog.
Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra. 2022. ‘Unpleasant’but ‘helpful’: Immigration detention and urban entanglements in New Jersey, USA. Urban Studies 59(11): 2179-2198.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2023. ‘There is no race here’: on blackness, slavery, and disavowal in North Africa and North African studies. The Journal of North African Studies 28(3): 635-665.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen & Zineb Rachdi El Yacoubi. 2022. Externalizing otherness: The racialization of belonging in the Morocco-EU Border. Geoforum.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2020. Contained and abandoned in the “humane” border: Black migrants’ immobility and survival in Moroccan urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(5): 887-904.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. 2018. Intimate economies of immigration detention: critical perspectives. Gender, Place & Culture 25(9): 1399-1401.
Nancy Hiemstra and Deirdre Conlon. 2021. Reading between the (redacted) lines: muddling through absent presences in public information requests on US Immigration detention. ACME 20(6): 666-686.
Nancy Hiemstra. 2019. Detain and Deport: The chaotic US immigration enforcement regime. University of Georgia Press.
David Kaufmann, Nora Räss, Dominique Strebel and Fritz Sager. 2022. Sanctuary Cities in Europe? A Policy Survey of Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants. British Journal of Political Science 52(4):1954–1963.
David Kaufmann and Dominique Strebel. 2021. Urbanizing Migration Policy-Making: Urban Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Geneva and Zürich. Urban Studies 58(4): 2991-3008.
David Kaufmann. 2019. Comparing urban citizenship, sanctuary cities, local bureaucratic membership, and regularizations, Public Administration Review 79(3): 443–446.
Domenic Vitiello. 2022. The Sanctuary City: Immigrant, Refugee, and Receiving Communities in Postindustrial Philadelphia. Cornell University Press. [open access]
Further reading…
Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry, 2006. Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), pp.1-22.
Mimi Sheller and John Urry, 2006. The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and planning A, 38(2), pp.207-226.
Mimi Sheller, 2017. From spatial turn to mobilities turn. Current sociology, 65(4), pp.623-639.
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Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
But what I really became interested in is the way that the border travels. It's a mobile thing. Or it's a mobile ensemble that is always inscribing these sorts of inclusions and exclusions of people and spaces, and it does it through different techniques.
Emily Holloway
Hi, this is Emily Holloway. You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by the journal Urban Affairs Review. In this four-part series, we’re approaching the city through its connections to human migration. This is a really ambitious and broad set of topics and questions – when you consider historical patterns of migration, the different ways that geography influences and shapes these patterns, the politics of migration policy, the role of immigrant communities in remaking cities – I could go on, and on. So instead of attempting to be comprehensive, or even representative, we’re going to jump around a bit. This four part series features interviews with five different scholars who examine migration and urban space in different ways, like Andrew Baldwin.
Andrew Baldwin
Sure. So I'm professor of human geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Durham University is in the northeast of England, just about 20 miles or so South of Newcastle, just to reference for your listeners. The work that I do in, in the broadest sense, is to try and develop a set of critical vocabularies for thinking about the relationship between climate change in the broadest sense and migration in the broadest sense.
Emily Holloway
You heard at the top from Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, a geographer.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
My name is Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen. I'm a lecturer at Yale University in the Macmillan Center for International Studies. Particularly, I'm located in African Studies and Middle East studies. And then I have a lot of other affiliations across campus, but particularly in the Center for Race, Indigeneity and Transnational migration, and in anthropology.
Emily Holloway
Later in this episode, you’ll hear some excerpts from my conversation with Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra, who have been collaborating on an ambitious and vital project called Detention Economies for many years now.
Nancy Hiemstra
I am Nancy Hiemstra and I am an associate professor at Stony Brook University, a SUNY State University of New York School, and I'm in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Deirdre Conlon
OK, sure. So, hi, I'm Deirdre Conlon and I am an associate professor based at the University of Leeds in England.
Emily Holloway
And in future episodes, you’ll hear from Domenic Vitiello, who discusses his 2022 book Sanctuary City.
Domenic Vitiello
So I'm Dominic Vitiello. I'm a professor of city planning and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania and for about 2 decades. Most of my work has been with migrant communities in Philadelphia and other parts of the United States and Canada and currently, I also do a lot of my work with migrants mainly from North and West Africa, who are in Sicily and other parts of Southern Italy.
Emily Holloway
Along with some really key insights on sanctuary cities in Europe from UAR Editorial Board member David Kaufmann.
David Kaufmann
Hi everyone. My name is David Kaufman. I'm assistant professor of spatial development and urban policy at ETH Zurich. This is the Federal Technical University of Switzerland. I'm also director of the Center Network City and landscape and also the Deputy director of the Institute For spatial and landscape development, both at ETH Zurich and I'm an editorial board member of the journal URBAN Affairs Review.
Emily Holloway
But for today, we’ll start this wide-ranging set of conversations by exploring what the border is, how it both moves, and how it shapes movement. These ideas also touched on a really important intellectual framework, mobilities studies. The show notes have a great selection of readings to learn more about mobilities studies. But to give you a little bit of background, mobilities is a critical framework that examines movement – of people, things, ideas, money, and so on. It’s an interdisciplinary approach, and although a lot of the early work is rooted in sociology, you can observe its impact across social scientific and humanistic disciplines including geography, economics, history, and anthropology. Besides exploring social phenomena and problems through movement, mobilities also examines just how movement can actually happen. Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen’s research looks at how these come together in the context of North African migration practices.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So I described my, I described this research project or the work that I'm doing right now as looking at the way that West and Central African migrants get stuck in Morocco as they travel from their home countries to Europe. And as I said before, the EU has invested a lot of money and political influence in guiding Northern African countries like Morocco to contain these migrant people beyond European borders and many of the people that come that pass through Morocco are going to go maybe 3 routes. One is to take a boat and often a Zodiac boat, an inflatable boat across the Mediterranean Sea to mainland Europe or across the Atlantic Sea to the Canary Islands, where they'll make an asylum claim, or to climb the fences that separate Morocco from two Spanish enclaves that are adjacent to Moroccan territory, which are Malia and Sauta. And so those are the sites that get a lot of attention in the media for good reason. There's a lot of spectacular violence and death that that happens there when migrant people want to try to cross the fence, they must climb three 6-meter-high fences topped with barbed wire. They're often beaten; people in the ocean, their boats frequently capsize, and rescue is often delayed deliberately by coast guards, so those are places where we see a lot of intensity.
But what I really became interested in is the way that the border travels. It's a mobile thing. Or it's a mobile ensemble that is always inscribing these sorts of inclusions and exclusions of people and spaces, and it does it through different techniques. And so, in Morocco you have these spectacular sites of violence at the fences in the sea, but you also have these less visible parts of the border, which are particularly in urban areas. And this actually happened as a result of Morocco reforming its border policy in 2013, because of humanitarian outcry against the violence that are happening in these and at the fence in the sea, so Morocco started having a policy of sort of official tolerance.
Emily Holloway
You mentioned that parts of the border are in these urban areas, that are actually physically pretty distant from the territorial borders. How does this play out, and how does this impact migrant individuals and communities?
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
One of the ways that this played out is they would round people up and remove them from places where they might be able to take a boat, or from camps that were near the fences in the north and bust them hundreds and hundreds of miles to the south and dump them in urban areas and urban centers. And once they were in these urban centers, they were pretty much left on their own.
And so, Morocco's been given a lot of credit for not deporting everyone, not indefinitely detaining everyone in the way that, for example, the United States does, but rather just letting them get on with their lives in these urban spaces. But I really understood being with West and Central African migrants in these urban areas that this wasn't really about tolerance and it wasn't really about a humane way to continue to limit their mobility, but rather it was abandonment and it was an organized process that the state initiated in order to fulfill its requirements to border, to be the police officer or the border guard for Europe.
Emily Holloway
But do you find that these migrants are all intending to continue on to Europe?
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So for some west and central African migrants that have found themselves in Morocco, if they're able to find a way to generate money and to sustain themselves and sustain their loved ones back home, they will happily stay. I think in the media a lot of times, particularly in European discourse, media discourse, there's this idea or this representation of Europe as El Dorado, and I never heard people say that. I did not hear people represent it that way. But there is a sense that Europe offers greater livelihood opportunities and social status advancement than Morocco does, and that I think that's true.
So for a lot of migrant people, Europe is definitely their destination, but many of them have been in Morocco at this point for, you know, a decade. A lot of the people that I knew best that I met during field work between 2016 and 2018 had been there since, I don't know 2014, 2013, and all of the women that I knew are still there and most of the men are still in Morocco, so whether or not they aspire to keep going to Europe and I think many of them do, for many of them, Morocco is their de facto home.
Emily Holloway
So countries like Morocco end up being the crossroads, or like a buffer zone for migration that are kind of coerced into policing European migration too. There’s some resonance with migration in the Americas that seems super obvious, too.
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
I think comparing what I'm I kind of gloss as the American border, which by American I don't mean the United States, I mean North America, Central America, South America. So the American border and the Eurafrican border, which is what I work on, which just to unpack that for a minute, I think of as Europe or southern Europe, in particular the eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey and northern Africa, and pushing further into southern into central and southern Africa. So I think of the American and Euro-African borders as having a lot of commonalities in broad terms, I think a lot of the fine grained-edness of it is quite different in some ways, but there are some really broad commonalities across them and one really has to do with this idea of externalization, which is where these so-called destination places like the United States or the European Union is investing a lot more money and political influence in countries that are neighboring their border to contain these migrants outside of it. So, Mexico has received tremendous investment from the United States as well as tremendous, you know, pressure from the United States to keep Central Americans outside of, you know, from crossing the US-Mexico border and containing now refugees and asylum seekers as well, who you know, according to international law, should be allowed to cross the border to make an asylum claim.
So that's happening in the US, Mexico, Central America context in very much the same way that it's happening in the Euro-African context. So the European Union since the late 1990s has invested, you know, I mean, billions at this point of dollars in enlisting places like Turkey and Morocco and Libya in containing West and Central Africans or Central Africans and Southern Africans away from Europe's border, so acting as this giant buffer zone and it's not a coincidence that those have emerged basically, simultaneously. A lot of this is because of information sharing, right? And the circulation of policy experts, the circulation of policing experts. People are using the same tech, like Israeli defense tech has been repackaged for so-called civilian use against asylum seekers and migrants, other defense companies are doing the same thing, so there's a lot of this, these logics of this continental border or transcontinental border regime that are happening in both of those places because a lot of the actors are the same.
And so that's one thing. The other thing is that a lot of the way that this can happen in both of these sites is through the tightening of legal regimes against unauthorized migrants. So, where I'm from in Texas, crossing the border until the 1990s really was a misdemeanor. It wasn't imprisonable, it wasn't considered, you know, a crime. And it's only been in recent years that has become a serious crime, and one that can get you deported, and then you also can't return to the United States, et cetera.
And criminalization of migration has also been a major pressure point for the European Union on these other countries. So, Morocco illegalized unauthorized entry and exit from the country. In 2003, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, did shortly around that time as well. So, these kind of legal regimes are similar as well, and also, the way that smuggling has developed. You know, as borders get harder and harder, it doesn't mean that people are able to stay in place because they're displaced because of war. They're displaced because of, you know, dispossession, because of economic disinvestment, and the need to pursue livelihood. And this is true across all these spaces that have been really ravaged by structural adjustment and before that colonialism.
Emily Holloway
So we’ve definitely gotten to talk about borders quite a bit, but I wonder if we can maybe shift back to our earlier conversation on mobilities. You kind of talked a bit about how different migrant communities end up settling in cities in North Africa, whether by choice or not, as they make their way north towards Europe. I know that mobilities studies touches on the connections that are made by diasporic communities and networks – is this something you observed or learned about during your fieldwork there?
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
I do think about the local communities that I knew in cities in Morocco as nested in these what I call migrant moral economies that are transnational in scope and are often anchored in cities and anchored in places where people find themselves either, as you said, way stations, or where people have just found themselves stuck for longer amounts of time. And some of those are predictably, sort of along the migration routes or in key destination cities where they're rejoined, you know joining a sister or a partner or somebody else who's already gone before.
And one example that really hit home for me about that, well, two examples. One is not about migration, but it's about mobility. So, I'm going to add it in there because it's so fascinating. So one is that one of the impacts of the US war on drugs in the Americas was that a lot of South American and Central American drug trade started being routed through the Sahel and a lot of the drugs move up to Europe through the same routes that migrants are taking. So, it's interesting to think about how sort of these, you know, politics in the Americas created these new pathways and professionalized routes I guess for people to travel along, you know, from West Africa to Europe.
But the other direction is I was with a friend who has since made it to France and we were in Casablanca at the time, and we got a text message from his good friend who's also from Guinea and had been deported from Morocco and saved money and then flew to Ecuador and was now on Labista and he was taking the migration journey up from Central America up to the United States. And he actually had made it to San Antonio, which is where I'm from. So I was giving him my sister's phone number in case he needed anything! But it was really interesting to think about like how these networks are really creative and mobile and shifting all the time. And I wouldn't say that people maintain these networks or these communities or affiliations durably for extended periods of time, but certainly they do mobilize them or enter into these relationships that span really the globe.
And again, they're very centered in urban spaces. I think one of the more successful things that Morocco has done recently is to stop abandoning people or dumping people in big cities, and now they're dumping them in rural areas. And it is more successfully breaking down some of those networks because it's harder to make a living, it's harder to hustle, even to travel through the country. There aren't communities already established there, and so it's been a little bit more of a challenge and what people do as soon as they get money is move back to a city.
Emily Holloway
Can you say a little more about that? How do cities or urban spaces help to foster or, I don’t know if nurture is the right word, but how do they have an effect on cities, and how is it that mobilities plays a part in that?
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
So I would say like just to ground it a little bit, Moroccan cities are really being transformed by migrant people and this is not just West and Central African migrants, but Morocco itself in the last 30 or 40 years is very much constituted by its expatriate, you know or its migrant population, that lives in Europe. So much money comes in that builds the houses that that we see, the huge housing boom, the cars that people drive, et cetera. And so our understanding of place and people's role in it, their identity, really has -- I'm not going to say it has everything to do with mobility, but it has quite a lot to do with mobility.
So one thing that mobility has helped me think about is processes of race and subjectivation, right. Again, I keep saying this, but race is an ensemble, it's relational, it's not just global, it's not just local, but it's these interactions and these flows and so mobility again subverts this idea of what Lisa Milky called the “National Geographic,” that there's a certain kind of people that belong in a certain kind of space and those are wedded together. And when you migrate away from that space, you're, you know, a fundamental part of who you are is cut off. That, you know, that can be really meaningful for diasporas, for example, but it also can be really limiting, and it and inherently has to do with producing inclusion and exclusion right? Like who belongs and who doesn't belong has to do with are you in your place or are you a body out of place?
So mobilities has really helped me think about how just those ideas of who you are, who your group is, where your group belongs? Those move around and those interact with other ideas and clash, and it's a very much a politics, it's a struggle and it's something that's contingent. And so I think we need to think about ethnic identity, racial identity, gender identity, all of these things as very real, mattering very much, but also always contestable or contingent. And it's kind of a weird thing to say, but mobility has really helped me understand that. And then the other thing that mobilities has helped me think about is the relationship between peoples experience and the movement, the experiences on the move and the movement of things. And so I think a lot about the movement of money and how that impacts how people move or don't move. I think about it in terms of the migration economy, the political economy of borders, the exchange of, you know, like we said, expertise on bordering or military tech and so on.
Emily Holloway
Leslie pointed out how the border can move – that it’s visible in spaces of enforcement, for example, which are not necessarily tied to territories. They make significant claims about citizenship and belonging, and often do so through policing mechanisms or incarceration. Deirdre Conlon, who I spoke with alongside her collaborator Nancy Hiemstra, explores this roving border idea through their joint research on migrant detention facilities and economies.
Deirdre Conlon
So we wrote a piece for a special issue in territory politics and governments on polymorphous, the special issue theme was on pop Amorphous borders and in that article what we wrote about were some of the webs of bureaucracy that operate in immigration detention, around the contracts and subcontracts that we have been talking about here. And so in in that sense, we do address the place of the border and the kind of materialization of the border Within detention facilities and within the relations that sustained detention facilities. So, it's not even just a kind of a physical movement of the border into another place or a location in the northeast of the United States, it's about relations. So, the border is a relation, right? I think that you know when we're thinking about the message that we want to convey in the book that we're working on and we've alluded to some of the sort of messaging around sort of our conclusions when it comes to thinking about ending immigration detention and what that necessitates, What that requires, I think it also requires that we think about an anti-capitalist argument or anti-capitalist kind of movements that work across borders at multiple scales because you know again from an abolitionist framework, if we're going to change a system of oppression and inequality, then we have to address that at multiple scales across multiple borders.
Emily Holloway
And can you help us understand what a detention economy is? How do you define it?
Deirdre Conlon
In short, it scrutinizes the financial webs and the relationships that are the lifeblood of US. The detention system as sort of the empirical focus of our work, but also of detention more broadly and to elaborate on that in a little bit more detail, our argument with the detention economies is that financial webs that are at the heart of the system extract value from immigrant detainees’ bodies; morally infect public perceptions and policy making around immigrants and immigration; and continue the spread of detention within and beyond the United States.
Emily Holloway
Nancy, can you share how you got into this project in the first place?
Nancy Hiemstra
Well, I mean, I can. My interests or my how I came to this project similarly through my previous research project, which was my dissertation research where I was in Ecuador. And I ended up volunteering for a migrant assistant organization there and what they needed. The biggest demand that an English speaker could do was trying to locate detained family members in US immigration detention centers because, you know, if everything's just so chaotic and disorganized that if somebody had a detained family member was kind of like they disappeared. So I spent a lot of time just calling detention centers and then talking to the family members and then also speaking to people once they had been deported to Ecuador and I became really interested, this thing that kept coming up was that, you know, people had nothing in detention and they would be desperately trying to get in touch with family members, even in Ecuador to send money so that they could buy things in detention, just food, and I mean anything, right? And there was also this one deportee that I interviewed, was talking about when he was on the plane being deported back to Ecuador, and this man spoke English. He had lived in the US many, many years and but he said that the guards on the plane didn't think that he could speak English. And so, as they were getting off the plane, one of the guards said to people kind of jokingly in English, like get off the plane and don't come back, and another guard said to that guard. It replied in English, he said don't say that or we won't have work, right or we'll be out of a job. And so that really got me interested into, like, what is it that is being sustained here, right? There's kind of the whole discourse in the media and by politicians about why we have these detention and deportation policies, why they're necessary. But what's really driving it right, so those kinds of combined things I think pulled Deirdre and I together to think about, OK, how can we really drill Down into the economy, the money and how that circulates Just within detention.
Emily Holloway
Nancy and Deirdre brought up some really important elements to flesh out this discussion of mobilities and borders – particularly how capital plays a role in making and reproducing these circuits of migration and incarceration, and, as a result, racial formations and identities – which we’ll start exploring in another episode in this series.
And a really important part of that conversation is understanding the role that climate change plays in these dynamics. I spoke with Andrew Baldwin, who, with his collaborators Christiane Froehlich and Delf Rothe, organized a special issue in Mobilities journal back in 2019 that addressed these overlaps and tensions head-on.
Andrew Baldwin
That special issue was titled “To processing mobilities…” or from what do we call it… “from climate change migration to Anthropocene mobilities.” And it was a set of papers that came out of a workshop in Hamburg that was organized by Delf and Christiane. They are, I should add, and underscore strongly the sort of key movers in that special issue and I sort of tagged along for the ride.
But anyway, that special issue was really trying to open up a space to think about, you know, questions about human mobility in the broadest sense in relation to the Anthropocene, in a kind of intellectual gesture that moves us away from what at the time, felt like some kind of tired, stagnant debates around climate change and human migration, where people were just sort of talking about the same things over and over again and rehearsing all the same critiques. So, the Anthropocene mobilities workshop offered a chance to think afresh about some of these issues.
And the special issue itself, we kind of we had all these amazing papers, and we just weren't sure exactly where to position them, which, you know, which journal to publish them in. It just was it just, we really weren't sure about this at all. And we thought, well, maybe Mobilities journal would be interested in this and so we contacted them, and they were interested, and that sort of put the onus on us to make a case for why these papers, you know, had a place in the journal Mobilities. None of us – Delf, Cristiane, or myself – come out of that sociological tradition of mobilities, the mobilities paradigm.
But in the course of sort of arriving at that journal as a venue for the special issue, we started investigating a little bit more about mobilities and it became really clear to us that within that wider sort of framework of the mobilities paradigm, there was only a limited discussion around the Anthropocene mostly centered around the work of Brazinski, working with some really interesting ideas around the planetary. So that was the introduction to the special issue was very much about saying, look, here is a whole bunch of debates that have been going on climate change and migration which don't really deal with the concept of mobilities, but maybe they should, on the one hand and then on the other here are, you know, here's this really interesting, fascinating, prolific field of mobilities research, the mobilities paradigm, that kind of really isn't engaging with climate change in the Anthropocene, as perhaps it might be. So, we sort of pitched the special issue as a bringing together of these two worlds in the hopes that it might just sort of catalyze something.
So that's why I say that, you know, migration studies on the one hand is very different from mobility studies on the other. Migration studies really is about trying to, you know, come to an understanding of migration and the politics of migration, how migration is regulated. There's very often a transnational dimension to migration studies, not always. Whereas mobilities and the mobilities paradigm is much more interested in understanding how sociological phenomena, political phenomena, legal phenomena, spatial phenomena of various sorts, is underpinned by human mobility. The sort of intellectual move of mobility, of the mobilities paradigm is to say that mobility is primary in the constitution of social relations, and so can we, you know, build a kind of sociological political analysis that recognizes and foregrounds mobility.
Emily Holloway
That’s a really helpful distinction. And I’ll note here for listeners that we included a link to the special issue that Andrew, Christiane and Delf organized in our show notes, if you want to check it out.
In our next episode, we’ll continue this conversation with Andrew, Leslie, and our other guests to think through some of the ways that racism shapes and is shaped by migration and borders, and how these dynamics also end up changing urban spaces.
Andrew Baldwin
So the figure of the climate migrant is a fully naturalized form of other, which is to say that it's de- historicized it doesn't have a kind of its unique history. Movement and mobility are a function of climate, which in this case is sort of, you know, code for nature. The figure of the climate refugee stroke climate migrant is often displaced from the category of the political, it is a figure without political agency.
Emily Holloway
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.