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.

The Liminal Space in Calais

Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of “The Jungle”

Howarth, Anita and Ibrahim, Yasmin. (2012). ‘Threat and Suffering: The Liminal Space of “The Jungle”’. in Andrews, H. and Roberts, L. Liminal Spaces. London: Routledge.

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

In 2009 French authorities demolished and cleared an informal shelter in Calais known as "the Jungle". British national press constructed this as a rational response to the problem of illegal migration. Crucial to this justification was the metaphoric use "The Jungle" to describe the descent into anarchic degradation which spilt out into surrounding spaces of civility. This metaphor facilitated the use of a pseudo-rational discourse in which the appropriate policy response to (physical and moral) threat was to expel the other, demolish "The Jungle" so deal forcibly with the illegal migrants. Within this pseudo-rational discourse the issue of immigration becomes a liminal space between rationality and atavism in enlightened societies.