This paper aims to understand how media outlets, political actors and activist groups have come to interpret the dead of the Lampedusa shipwreck on the 3rd of October in 2013. Moreover, it defends the hypothesis that these mediations work around and play with the invisibility/visibility of the dead. Through a genealogy of the various interpretations that were made, this paper shows how the dead were first represented as bodies, to be treated materially and symbolically; secondly, as public policy issues, caught up in political controversies; and finally, as people with fundamental rights, to be respected and remembered.
Topic:
Migration, Refugees, Immigrants, and Humanitarian Crisis
Based on two separate studies in sociology and geography, this article emphasizes the effects of “armour-plating” borders in the European Union through a focus on the confinement measures used on migrants at the Greece-Turkey border. Analysing both the construction and contention of detention centres on Lesbos Island, this paper shows that migration control is situated in a myriad of formal as well as informal sites, therefore going beyond the walls of official centres and sanctioning the immobilization or locking up of migrants. Consequently, this article places official detention centres and spaces created by civil society in a wider continuum. While the latter provide an alternative form of detention, in extending and reproducing logics of confinement, in the end, they too build barriers.
Topic:
Migration, Sociology, Border Control, Refugees, and Geography