Abstract
Exploring maps produced by asylum-seekers living in Glasgow this chapter exposes the spatial-temporal limits of sanctuary’s welcome.
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Notes
Inderjit Bhogal, National City of Sanctuary AGM. Nottingham, United Kingdom. October 31, 2011.
I use the term ‘frontier’ here drawing from: Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling Frontiers: free movement into and within Europe. (London: Ashgate, 2005). Bigo and Guild suggest that frontiers are not to be conflated with borders, which tend to imply a geographical and physical edge. Frontiers open up a more complex and malleable level of analysis and indeed represent more invisible social practices of division.
In relation to the more in-depth allusion of sanctuary as a ‘meeting place’ or place of exchange. See: John Pedley, Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 52.
Peter Hopkins, Elizabeth Olson, Rachel Pain and Giselle Vincett, ‘Mapping intergenerationalities: the formation of youthful religiosities,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, (2011), 314–327;
Lyon A. Staeheli, Don Mitchell, and Caroline R. Nagel, ‘Making publics: immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to “the public”,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, (2009), 633–648.
Craig Barnett and Inderjit Bhogal, Becoming a City of Sanctuary: A Practical Handbook with Inspiring Examples. (Plug and Tap, 2009), 11.
Jonathon Darling, ‘A city of sanctuary: the relational re-imagining of Sheffield’s asylum politics,’ in Transactions of the instutite of British Geographers 35, no. 1 (2010), 125–140.
Ibid. In reference to Doreen Massey, World City. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 179.
This approach to the ‘urban’ as a relational process is not new. Expressions of this approach are evident, for instance, in Louis Wirth who claimed in 1964 that: ‘As long as we identify urbanism with the physical entity of the city, viewing it merely as rigidly delimited in space, and proceed as if urban attributes abruptly cease to be manifested beyond an arbitrary line, we are not likely to arrive at any adequate conception of urbanism as a mode of life.’ Louis Wirth, On Cities and Social Life. (The University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Doreen Massey, World City. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 6.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 279.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 296, 292.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 49. These maps interrupt what Shapiro refers to as dominant cartographic practices that contain, generalize and erase the complexity of life and lived experiences
(Michael Shapiro, Violent Cartographies. (University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
David Campbell, Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia,’ Political Geography 18, no. 4 (1999), 395–435).
As James Scott’s analysis of cartographic methods famously illuminates, maps can serve as a standardized technology to view life ‘from above,’ from a sort of ultimate perspective that blanches out everyday life James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. (Yale University Press, 1985). He argues that maps are a modern tool that can enforce us to ‘see like a state’—that is, to imagine things from the viewpoint of a sovereign government or a sovereign people.
See: Warren Magnusson, Politics of Urbanism: Seeing Like a City. (Routledge, 2011).
John Pedley, Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29.
Matthew Price, Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose and Limits. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Charles Statsny, “The Roots of Sanctuary” in Refugee Issues 2, no. 4, (1987). Although Price frames sanctuary as a contained practice even within the historical account, his various traces unsettle this narrative. For instance, before sanctuary was enshrined in Roman law the practice was ‘already recognized and well established’ and was in fact not delimited to the confines of a particular building, religious or otherwise. A form of sanctuary was said to be afforded to those who fled to an unenclosed statue of a Caesar, or to those who clung to an ‘image of god while grasping a broken twig or wool, the signs of a supplicant.’
Vicki Squire and Jennifer Bagelman, ‘Taking not waiting: space, temporality and politics in the City of Sanctuary movement,’ in Migration and Citizenship: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement, eds. Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel. (Routledge, 2010).
Inderjit Bhogal, Unlocking the Doors. (Penistone Publications, 2001).
Doreen Massey, World City. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 6.
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Methodology for the human sciences,’ Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 162.
For a more in-depth critique of a Hegelian model of time that projects time as ‘true’ and historically inevitable see: Michael Shapiro, Time and the City. (Routledge, 2010).
Saulo Cwerner, ‘Faster, faster and faster: the time politics of asylum in the UK,’ Time and Society 13, (2004), 71–88.
Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat. ‘Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance,’ in Sovereign Lives Power in Global Politics. (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Michael Shapiro, Time and the City. (Routledge, 2010), 10.
See: Heather Johnson, ‘Moments of solidarity, migrant activism and (non) citizens at global borders: political agency at Tanzanian refugee camps, Australian detention centers and European borders’ movement,’ Migration and Citizenship: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement, eds. Peter Nyers and Kim Rygiel. (Routledge, 2010).
Anne McNevin, ‘Irregular migrants neoliberal geographies and spatial frontiers of “the political”,’ Review of International Studies 33, no. 4 (2007).’ Also see: http://www.govanfolkuniversity.org/Govan_Together.html (accessed: June 12, 2012).
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the societies of control,’ in October 59, (1992), 3–7
Henning Mankell, Firewall. (London: Vintage, 2008).
Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Nikolas Rose, ‘The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government,’ Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996), 327–356.
Peter Hopkins, Elizabeth Olson, Rachel Pain and Giselle Vincett, ‘Mapping intergenerationalities: the formation of youthful religiosities,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, (2011), 314–327;
Lyon A. Staeheli, Don Mitchell and Caroline R. Nagel, ‘Making publics: immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to “the public”,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, (2009), 633–648.
Closs Stephens, A. ‘Urban atmospheres: feeling like a city?’ International Political Sociology 9, (2015), 99–101.
Also see: Anderson and Holden specifically explore how an assemblage of languages and practices of ‘hope’ shaped the city of Liverpool’s cultural regeneration. Ben Anderson and Adam Holden, Affective urbanism and the event of hope,’ in Space and Culture 11, (2008), 142–159.
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Bagelman, J.J. (2016). Drawing Out Time. In: Sanctuary City: A Suspended State. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480385_4
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