Mobility, Identity, Security

The research of this group combines newly developing foci on geopolitics and new dimensions of identity and mobility with long-standing departmental interests in migration and geographies of difference. Staff with research interests in these areas include Caroline Bressey, Jason Dittmer, Claire Dwyer, Alan Ingram, Alan Latham, Paul Longley, Pablo Mateos, JoAnn McGregor, Ben Page, Ruth Panelli, John Salt and Ann Varley. Variously, they have been influential in:

• shaping the UK government’s managed migration strategy
• estimating levels of illegal migration
• exploring geographical dimensions to the identities of children, the elderly, and Black, transnational and diasporic populations
• analysing connections between national security and disease management
• deconstructing nationalist politics in Africa and North America

The group incorporates the research of departmental and interdepartmental units including the Migration Research Unit (MRU) and the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), inter-university research programmes (Leverhulme Centre for Migration & Citizenship, EU European Migration Network), and a variety of individual research grants and fellowships from ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the Home Office and the University of London School of Advanced Studies.

International migration, transnationalism and diasporic identities

• John Salt has shaped UK and European migration management strategies, undertaken definitive research on international skilled labour migration, human smuggling and trafficking, and co-directed Leverhulme’s programme on ‘The Movement of People in the Modern World’.
• Alan Latham is showing how the internationally mobile exploit globalisation to create globally extensive life-projects.
• JoAnn McGregor is tracing global care-chains and examining how Zimbabwean migrants to the UK are reconfiguring families over transnational space.
• Claire Dwyer’s work links transnationalism, multiculturalism and commodity culture in the context of the UK-South Asian fashion industry.
• Ben Page has been integrating concepts of transnationalism and diaspora with psychoanalytic theory in his research on African hometown associations.
• Paul Longley and Pablo Mateos are contributing to debates on social as well as geographical mobility in their reconstructions of inter-generational moves of people at local, regional, national and international scales.

New geographies of difference

• Ruth Panelli shows how women, rural youth and indigenous peoples navigate social difference, including their experiences of safety and fear;  and she reconceptualises ideas of  community utilising Nancy’s philosophy of ‘being singular plural’.
• Claire Dwyer is demonstrating the roles of gender and ethnicity in social-capital formation and educational attainment among young British Pakistani Muslims.
• Ann Varley’s work challenges the association between home and a fixed and exclusionary self. Her work on gender and ageing in Latin America focuses on older people’s living arrangements, and relates legal conceptual landscapes to material domestic spaces.
• Pablo Mateos’s new ontology of ethnicity based upon personal names compensates for often inadequate official sources of information on geographies of ethnicity.
• In historical research, Caroline Bressey is recovering geographies of anti-racism and the Black presence in 19^th-century London and Richard Dennis is integrating qualitative and quantitative representations of women and their experiences in the housing market in early 20^th-century Toronto.

Geopolitics and biopolitics

• Gail Davies’ work on the regulation and public acceptance of transgenic organisms and Alan Ingram’s research on the securitisation of infectious diseases, expressed in national governments’ regulation of migration and access to health care, are both situated within debates on the spatiality of an emerging bio-economy.
• Alan Ingram is also working on representations of the re-emergence of geopolitics in post-Soviet Russia.
• Jason Dittmer focuses on popular geopolitics and regional identity construction, examining American national identity and the impact of print media on Eastern European geopolitics.
• JoAnn McGregor is investigating the politics of state borders in Africa, state militarisation, and ongoing debates about nationalism and patriotism in Zimbabwe.

Methodological innovations

The work of staff associated with the group involves some innovative methodologies:

• Paul Longley and Pablo Mateos’ GIS-based research facilitates new geographies of genealogy and naming through data-mining, fusing diverse historic and contemporary data sets in a spatial framework. Paul Longley’s ‘names’ project has generated huge media and popular interest: www.spatial-literacy.org attracted 1.4 million users in 2006.
• Alan Latham uses diary – photo diary – interview methods to research everyday practices, and Ann Varley has researched and written from family experience about the dilemmas of ageing for concepts of ‘home’ and their significance for personal identity.
• Caroline Bressey explores the political-ethical paradoxes in historical research on ‘race’ and blackness, where particular groups would remain ‘hidden from history’ but for the survival of photographic evidence. Caroline’s engagement with visual sources has entailed close links with the National Portrait Gallery, where she designed their Slave-Trade Abolition trail  and the Museum in Docklands, where she is a curator of the ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ gallery.

‘Mobility, Identity, Security’ staff are involved in several of the Department’s MSc degrees : Environment, Science and Society; Globalisation; Modernity, Space and Place; and Urban Studies.

Click here for a list of Recent Grants.