Since the beginning of 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries—many of them fleeing war, persecution, and unrelenting poverty—have been crossing borders into and within Europe, traversing the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the English Channel. This so-called crisis has turned immigration, asylum, border control, and state sovereignty into interconnected problems, making migration not only a political event but also a media spectacle. Contributors to this Hot Spots series map the histories, geopolitics, ethical imaginaries, forms of sovereignty, and patterns of circulation that state categories of crisis and emergency render visible and/or invisible, in Europe and elsewhere. Each essay is accompanied by an image from End of Dreams, an installation and photo project by Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen.
Posts in This Series
Introduction: Refugees and the Crisis of Europe
Since the beginning of 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries—many of them fleeing war, persecution, and unrelenting ... More
Time Out of Joint: Larsen’s End of Dreams and Italy’s Colonial Unconscious
In June 2014, Danish sculptor and video artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen dropped forty-eight figures, evocative of human shapes and wrapped in concrete canvas... More
Hot Spots: What They Mean
The title of this section of the Cultural Anthropology website also happens to be the name given by the European Union to its imagined solution to the so-called... More
Crisis, Hot Spots, and Paper Pushers: A Reflection on Asylum in Greece
There is a tension in critically analyzing a crisis in a forum entitled Hot Spots, and I want to underscore at the outset two key points regarding increasing an... More
On Frequent Flyers and Boat People: Notes on Europe, Crisis, and Human Mobility
At the harbor of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos in the summer of 2014, I was struck by an emblematic scene: a party of tourists debarked from a cruise s... More
Catastrophes
The images of multitudes of people debarking from boats, being rescued at sea, walking along railways, or cutting through walls of wire have overrun our social ... More
Camp in the City
A number of figures haunt the fantasmatic space of the camps that have mushroomed in Berlin these last few months, figures that jostle for a place in the German... More
What’s Wrong with Innocence
The now iconic image of little Aylan, the three-year old Syrian boy whose body washed up onto a Turkish beach in September 2015, grabbed the world’s attention, ... More
Refugees, Pity, and Moral Superiority: The German Case
After it agreed to take in so many Syrian refugees, one doesn’t want to tell a bad story about Germany, but is it possible that something bad is coming along wi... More
The Power of Construction: Refugees and Turkey’s War in Northern Kurdistan
The ongoing war in Syria already includes other geographies. “We are all in the war,” said French president François Hollande after the November 2015 Paris atta... More
Grim Design: Australia’s Pacific Black Sites
For many, it took the pitiful image of a lifeless Aylan Kurdi, shared across thousands of Facebook pages, to bring home the murderous realities of Fortress Euro... More
The Caribbean Roots of European Maritime Interdiction
One morning in late October, law enforcement officials hauled thirty-three corpses from the surf, victims of an overloaded migrant vessel and rough seas. The su... More