Search for: All records

Abstract In this paper, we detail the process of organising and facilitating a visualisation challenge as part of a larger project centring visual methods. We explore how the visualisation challenge specifically operated to highlight feminist epistemological and methodological principals, and practically, what worked and what didn't. We conclude that visualisation challenges offer exciting potential to jumpstart creative and innovative project development, but if a challenge is to be successful, context matters, and so too do practical and logical considerations. We believe that feminist visualisation challenges offer exciting models to share findings and data, learn from emerging research practices, and build community within and beyond the academy. 

In this paper, we build on feminist geographical methodological innovations that link theories about data transparency and multiplicity with praxis, suggesting how feminist methods can better reflect the messiness of data. We argue that two interrelated strategies, feminist periscoping and feminist visualization, can highlight the strengths across messy data sets while also being transparent about the gaps within the data. We illustrate this argument using two examples from research into public information campaigns developed to dissuade unauthorized migration to the US and Australia. Taken together, we argue, feminist periscoping and feminist visualization approaches are an effective way of analyzing and disseminating messy data. 

Despite little evidence of efficacy, public information campaigns have been a popular strategy for deterring migration. Advertising campaigns to dissuade would-be migrants from leaving home or seeking asylum are increasingly prevalent around the world, and Australia has devoted millions of dollars to these campaigns. Perhaps the most famous is the campaign launched in 2014, with the message: “No Way. You will not make Australia home.” In this article, I develop the concept of enforcement infrastructure to illustrate the relationships, technologies, actors, and policies that together facilitate enforcement of Australia’s borders and produce campaigns such as the “No Way” campaign. Just as infrastructure facilitates the production of value in other contexts, so too does the creation of enforcement infrastructure produce different types of value in the context of enforcement. Mapping the enforcement infrastructure highlights the different types of value produced by this constellation of actors, from profitable market research to reinforcing colonial logics of exclusion. 

Geographers have been central to identifying and exploring the shifting spatialities of border enforcement and how different enforcement strategies alter the geography of state sovereignty. Migration-related public information campaigns (PICs) are one strategy that has received increasing attention from geographers and social scientists more broadly in recent years. While existing research examines the sites and spaces where PICs are distributed, as well as the affective content of their messaging, little research has examined the development of campaigns and the transnational connections that enable their deployment. This article draws on work in the fields of carceral circuitry and transnational enforcement networks in order to expand our understanding of affective governmentality as a transnational strategy of border governance. Based on data collected as part of a large-scale comparative study of the use of PICs by the US and Australian governments, we argue that this form of affective governmentality relies upon transnational circuits through which people, money, and knowledge move to enable the development and circulation of affective messaging. In doing so, we develop the concept of transnational affective circuitry to refer to the often contingent, temporary relations and connections that enable PICs to operate as a form of transnational affective governmentality aimed at hindering unauthorized migration. Our analysis illustrates the transnational connections that enable increasingly expansive and creative forms of border enforcement to emerge while also expanding the scope of examinations of affective governmentality to attend to the relations that undergird and enable this form of transnational governance. 

Scholars have increasingly focused on the role of the family within border enforcement practices. In this paper, we build on and extend these research efforts to propose a research agenda driven by a new understanding of the relationship between families and immigration enforcement. Drawing on examinations of emerging enforcement strategies, including family separation and public information campaigns, we suggest that the family as a social unit and set of relationships is increasingly targeted within the regulation of transnational migration, what we term “relational enforcement.” Greater attention to relational enforcement tactics, processes, and impacts helps to frame geographies of border enforcement.