Geography Department / Centre for Migration Policy Research (CMPR) Research Seminar

‘Human dignity and Biophysical Violence:

Migrant deaths across deserts and seas’

Dr Vicki Squire (Warwick University)

20 April 2016 at 2pm

in Glyndŵr C

(11.1 on this map)

The violence of contemporary border security practices is no more evident than in the phenomena of migrant deaths across ‘deserts and seas’. In this talk, Dr Squire reflects on her research across both the Sonoran Desert (US-Mexico) and the Mediterranean Sea (EU-North Africa), exploring similarities as well as differences between US and European practices of ‘governing migration through death’. Focusing in particular on identification and burial practices in each context, Dr Squire considers some of the ways in which ‘dignity’ features in interventions contesting migrant deaths. In so doing she reflects on the potential and limitations of such interventions, examining these in terms of what she suggests might be understood as a broader ‘crisis of humanism’.

For more information please contact Dr Angharad Closs Stephens (Geography Department) ([email protected])

Dr Vicki Squire is Reader in International Security at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL ([email protected]). She is Principal Investigator on the ESRC urgent research project Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat [https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/clusters/irs/crossingthemed/], and on the Leverhulme Fellowship Human Dignity and Biophysical Violence [https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/clusters/irs/humandignity] . Dr Squire is Associate Editor of the journal Citizenship [https://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/13621025.html], and  has written three books and over thirty journal articles and book chapters in the areas of border and migration politics, including The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (Palgrave, 2009) [https://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=294349], The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity (Routledge, 2011) [https://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415584616/], and Post/humanitarian Border Politics between Mexico and the US: People, Places, Things (Palgrave, 2015) [https://mobilitypoliticsseries.com/published-works/posthumanitarian-border-politics-between-mexico-and-the-us/ ].