A borderline crisis in language: the Calais Jungle, the ‘refugee crisis’ and the changing landscape of humanitarian aid

Reed, Harriet Anne (2021). A borderline crisis in language: the Calais Jungle, the ‘refugee crisis’ and the changing landscape of humanitarian aid. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

Reed2021PhD.pdf
Text
Restricted to Repository staff only until 1 January 2026.
Available under License All rights reserved.
Download (9MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with creative responses to the 2015-16 Calais Jungle and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe. Departing from studies that approach the Jungle as a ‘state of exception’, it draws instead upon the overdetermined notions of ‘refugee voice’ and ‘refugee storytelling’ to consider how ‘humanity’ has been negotiated, granted and revoked in Calais. I argue that creative representations of the Jungle signal a new chapter in refugee humanitarianism: one in which the ‘human’ of human rights, and the ‘human’ of humanitarianism, have become discursively entangled.

I chart an emergent language of grassroots refugee solidarity through texts, plays, documentaries, films, installations, exhibitions, and visual artworks produced about the Jungle between 2015 and 2020. I demonstrate the ideological role that refugees and asylum seekers have played in shoring up the spatiotemporal boundaries of the European nation during the ‘refugee crisis’, via a rhetorical process termed here ‘the affective economy of hopes and dreams’. Finally, the thesis argues that the Calais Jungle was not the edge, limit or ‘other’ of Europe. Rather, for British and European citizens, the camp has played a pivotal role in rethinking Europe as a geopolitical construct, and ‘Europeanness’ as a cultural concept, in the post-Brexit age.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):