You will never see the shores of Australia

Closed due to ‘flooding’? UK media representations of refugees and migrants in 2015–2016 – creating a crisis of borders

“…More recently, Wellings (2012) has argued that resistance to European integration provided the foundations for modern English nationalism, with seceding from the EU the goal of English nationalists; yet, the current UK context adds to evidence of many times and places in which such language has been or is being deployed by politicians and in the press. For example, in Australia in 1996, Pauline Hanson, in her first speech to the House of Representatives (in)famously stated that ‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’ (Chambers, 2018: 31). Despite objections or concerns raised by scholars in various contexts over the years, Chambers suggests such framings persist and may be spreading.…”

“…Despite objections or concerns raised by scholars in various contexts over the years, Chambers suggests such framings persist and may be spreading. He argues that ‘as rhetoric and topic, border security is an electoral weapon of the resurgent populist right: and we see this repeated all over the world at present, especially in post-Brexit Northern and Western Europe’ (Chambers, 2018: 12).…”

“…Media accounts have deemed this movement of people a European ‘migrant crisis’ (Barber, 2016; BBC News, 2016), a ‘migration crisis’ (Chambers, 2018: 1), or a ‘refugee crisis’ (Weaver, 2015). Such language suggests that the mass movement of people in 2015–2016 primarily affected Europe; in fact, however, the ‘top 10 countries hosting the largest numbers of refugees are all in developing regions.…”

Mobility and its discontents: Seeing beyond international space and progressive time

“…Once associated with the shady business of money laundering in secretive island locations, offshore financial centres have been normalized as part of state strategies to optimize positioning in the global political-economy (Palan, 2003; Sharman, 2010). The logic of offshore, as Peter Chambers (2018: 56) contends, relies on the notion of a fixed border outside of which the offshore site lies. However, logic of this kind becomes non-sensical when, for example, the entire Australian mainland is deemed an ‘offshore excised place’ for the purposes of seeking asylum.…”

Complexity, diversity and the role of the public sphere on the Internet

“…Thus, impartial judgments are judgments that would gain universal agreement in an ideal communication community'. 11 With this theory of rationality, communicative reason only begins with certain assumptions about the operation of language and the way things are best communicated. 12 If the world were ideal (i.e.…”