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’.