Title
“We'll be here until it all collapses”: An Ethnography of Persistence and Hope Among Solidarity Actors in the Calais Borderscape
Abstract
Across Europe and beyond, solidarity actors remain heavily engaged in the border struggle against the undignified treatment of people on the move. Border struggles are known to be hostile and exhausting, and repression against solidarity actors is rising; however, little is known about how solidarity actors persist in such challenging contexts. The northern French border in Calais has been described as a testing ground for Europe’s border externalisation policies. Understanding resistance and persistence in Calais, therefore, offers insights for both scholars and activists at other borders.
This thesis aims to examine how the repression of solidarity affects solidarity actors in Calais, focusing on their sustaining resistant practices and the roles of power and emotion in these practices. It also explores how repression shapes solidarity relations with people on the move. The thesis is based on one month of ethnographic observation and eleven interviews in Calais. Observation notes and interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, theoretically informed by ‘borderscapes as method’, Foucault’s ‘productive power’ and ‘resistance’, and Ahmed’s theories of ‘emotion’ and ‘solidarity’.
This thesis shows that, when facing repression, solidarity actors adopt protective relationships with people on the move, leading to dilemmas between their ideals and practices. Furthermore, experiences of repression politicise and fuel the drive to resist. The emerging resistant practices are marked by adaptability, including flexibility, creativity, using legal know-how, self-censorship, and counter-surveillance, which are not only guided by emotional attachments, such as anger and hope, but also by dynamic, relational, and productive power relations that generate new solidarity identities and practices. Future research could benefit from focusing further on the generative potential of struggles and specifically including intersectional and marginalised perspectives in the analysis.
Keywords
Repression, Solidarity, Resistance, Persistence, Border Struggle, Borderscapes, Productive Power, Emotions, Calais
Author
Marianne Eva Schinnerl-Reiss
Universities, year
Linköping University and Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg
Link
https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1995496/FULLTEXT02.pdf