Imaging the Jungles of Calais

 

Imaging the Jungles of Calais: 

Media Visuality and the Refugee Camp

Yasmin Ibrahim, Anita Howarth
Networking Knowledge Journal,  Vol 9, No 4 (2016)
 http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/446

 

Abstract

Calais became a space of renewed media interest in the summer of 2015, with an increased visuality into the state of refugees’ living conditions and their lives. We examine the images of the camps dubbed ‘the Jungle’ over time, when media started reporting on the camp which was demolished in 2009 and the more recent resurrections termed as ‘Jungle II’ or the ‘new Jungle’, thereafter. Earlier media coverage of the Jungle accompanied less visual depictions of their living conditions or daily existence beyond the threat they posed to their immediate environment. However, compared to 2009 there has been a surge in the number of images of the refugees, particularly a steep rise in 2014 and 2015. The refugee as an object of suffering and trauma is the subject of an abject gaze where the corporeal body is both a non-entity and invisible. Both death and the accident are ascribed to it, as inhabitants in this ‘state of exception’. We examine these aesthetics of trauma and violence in the liminal space of Calais. The increased visuality and curiosity in the camps since 2015 reinscribed the refugee as a political by-product of border politics, accentuating the refugee camp as a violent and dissonant space in civilised Europe. Despite the intimacy of the imagery, the increased visuality showcased the madness and futility produced through a border politics of legitimacy and ‘bare life’.

By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Coverage of articles and Images on the jungle in the British press from 2004 till 2015

Space Making, Policy and the Jungle in Calais

Space and the Jungle in Calais: Space Making through Place, Policy, Human Movement and Media

Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2015) ‘Space and the Jungle in Calais: Space Making through Place, Policy, Human Movement and Media’ in Einar Thorsen (ed) Media and the Margins. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. 

Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick / Calais - Manifestation contre les clandestins, l'immigration-invasion et l'islamisation de l'Europe, 8 novembre 2015 (19) / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons

This chapter analyses how the online versions of Britain’s two mid-market newspapers framed the migrant camps or ‘jungles’ on the French sea border as marginalised spaces. The French town of Calais has been the focal point of debates about illegal entry to the United Kingdom and in tandem cross-border tensions. The jungle as a physical entity is drawn into space-making in a multitude of ways which are complex and entwined. We examine discursive and material space constructions in framing human migration and how borders as interstitial spaces become continually redefined and reconstructed through the interactions of the corporeal body with the physical environment, policy enactments and cross border patrols. Spaces at the margin functioning beyond metaphors become heuristic entities where their material and intangible construction and destruction have consequences for shaping human empathy and engagement as well as distance and detachment with the migrant as a human and with immigration debates.

Space Construction and Media Reporting

 ‘Space Construction in Media Reporting: A Study of the Migrant Space in the “Jungles” of Calais

Ibrahim, Yasmin and Howarth, Anita (2015) ‘Space Construction in Media Reporting: A Study of the Migrant Space in the “Jungles” of Calais. Fast Capitalism. 12 (1). http://www.fastcapitalism.com/

Calais Refugee Camp,

By Michal Bělka [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to exclude the ‘other’.