Tag Archives: borders

Art and Visual Anthropology, Fieldworks

Vicki Squire: 12 days in Lampedusa: The potential and perils of a photo essay

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This post is also part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University).

I visited Lampedusa from 24 September to 5 October 2015 to commence fieldwork research for my new project, Human Dignity and Biophysical Violence: Migrant Deaths across the Mediterranean Sea. This photo essay documents some of the key encounters that I experienced during my visit.

I want to stress here that I originally had no intention of collecting images for a photo essay as part of this trip. I spontaneously took the photos on my mobile phone, and there is much room for improvement in terms of technical and compositional quality. Moreover, my compilation of these images into an essay is far from how I might have chosen if I had planned to produce a photo essay from the start. Despite its various limitations, I nevertheless hope that the essay is of value.
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Céline Cantat: Migration struggles and the crisis of the European project

This post is part of a series on migration and the refugee crisis moderated and edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University).

In April 2015, when four boats carrying almost two thousand people consecutively sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with a combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200, the idea that Europe was experiencing a “migrant crisis” came into currency. Over the next few months, a series of border disasters captured the attention of the European public, sometimes successfully if temporarily reversing the increasingly dehumanizing rhetoric of a “migrant crisis” by giving way to the notion of a “refugee crisis.”

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