T Davies

Biographic Data

ID45833
NAMET Davies
GIVEN NAMEST
FAMILY NAMEDavies
SIGNATUREDAVIES T
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Nottingham
ORCID0000-0001-8392-8151
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS37
TOTAL CITATIONS690
AUTHOR COUNT37
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1958
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX10

  • Necropolitical Compassion: Rhetorical Care and Repressive Borders in the English Channel

    Open AccessTesfalem Habte Yemane, Lucy Mayblin et al.ARTICLEInternational Political Sociology2026

    This article examines how a discourse of compassion is used to facilitate harmful, even deadly, bordering practices. That is, governing migration through exposure to harm, including premature death. Whilst important scholarship has explored this phenomenon in terms of “compassionate borderwork” and “humanitarian bordering,” we extend these analyses by foregrounding the racial-colonial logics underpinning bordering. This is done through engagement…

  • The border security economy in the English Channel: Small boats, racism and late imperialism

    Open AccessJoe Turner, Arshad Isakjee et al.ARTICLEPolitical Geography2026

    The movement of people in small boats across the English Channel to claim asylum has created a policy and media spectacle in the UK. This article examines the bordering regime along the Northern French Coast and in the UK which have shaped the criminalised journeys. Contributing to debates on the fragmentation of state power, we interrogate the political economy of bordering and the wider global and social interests that shape the border security…

  • Knowing the Border: Epistemic Friction and Irregular Crossings of the English Channel

    Open AccessTesfalem Habte Yemane, Lucy Mayblin et al.ARTICLEThe Sociological Review2026

    This article explores epistemic injustice in the context of border crossings. In many contexts around the world borders are fortified not only through walls, fences and guards, but also through knowledge claims about human mobility. We can conceptualise these types of claims as ‘epistemic borderwork’. This article discusses 39 semi-structured interviews with people who crossed the English Channel irregularly, primarily in small boats. These testi…

  • Witnessing scholasticide in Gaza: A conversation forum

    Open AccessT DaviesARTICLEEnvironment and Planning C…2026

    This conversation forum centres on Lubna Abu Sitta’s eyewitness account of scholasticide in Gaza, one of the first such testimonies to appear in an academic journal. Writing as a geographer from Al-Aqsa University under conditions of violent occupation, Abu Sitta documents the killing of geography professors and students, the destruction of educational spaces, and the intimate experience of studying amid devastation. In doing so, her testimony no…

  • Slow Death and Key Workers: The Ordinary Crisis of Waste Work During the Covid‐19 Pandemic

    Open AccessT Davies, Angeliki Balayannis et al.ARTICLETransactions of the Institute of…2026

    This article focuses on the experiences of waste workers in Glasgow at the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic, to explore how the ordinary workings of the UK waste industry are pushing bodies and infrastructures to the point of collapse. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with waste workers, and in conversation with Lauren Berlant's concepts of ‘slow death’ and the ‘crisis ordinary’, this article makes two key contributions. First, it reveals that waste…

  • Colonial legacies and cultural influences on discard behaviour: A systematic review

    Open AccessEmma Etim, T Davies et al.ARTICLELocal Environment2026

  • Seeking to quantify contributions that fisheries operations can make to a global Nature Positive goal

    Open AccessS A Karlsdóttir, H Booth et al.ARTICLEMarine Policy2026

    Amidst global efforts to address biodiversity loss, the concept of ‘Nature Positive’ has gained traction as a societal goal aligned with the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). While the goal is increasingly being embraced by governments and various business sectors, there has been little investigation into how fisheries, a key sector in the global economy and a major driver of marine biodiversity loss, could go beyond ‘sustainable fishing’ to c…

  • Necropolitics, Gaza, and the limits of theory

    Open AccessT Davies, Nick Clare et al.ARTICLEProgress in Human Geography2026References: 7

    We would like to thank Alexander A. Dunlap for his generous engagement with our article on necropolitics and geography (Peters et al 2025).His reflections on positionality and the varying intensities and scales of necropolitics resonate strongly with our own concerns.Likewise, we share his conviction that necropolitics cannot be reduced to death alone, but must be understood as part of a wider web of slow, fast, and injurious harms, intimately bo…

  • Necropolitics and geography

    Open AccessFreya Peters, Nick Clare et al.ARTICLEProgress in Human Geography2025Cited by: 5References: 92

    This paper reviews the rapidly growing body of geographical work on necropolitics. We argue that thinking carefully and spatially with and about necropolitics is useful for analysing widespread and uneven racialised suffering, particularly relating to the environment and borders. However, we note and caution against a tendency towards the ‘necro-everything’ and the ‘everything-necro’, which can both overstate and understate the role of death, pot…

  • Four seasons of border violence: The co-option of the seasons into the management of migration

    Open AccessKarolina Benghellab, T Davies et al.ARTICLEGeoforum2025Cited by: 4References: 24

    From ocean currents to rivers, deserts, and mountains, the environment is often weaponized into border controls against people homogeneously racialized as “irregular migrants’’. This paper is based on our observation that direct violence used during pushbacks – illegal forced returns over a border – are enforced as well as resisted in the context of seasonal shifts; temporal processes that have been side-lined in migration-violence literature. Ba…

  • Small Boats, Big Contracts: Extracting Value from the UK 's Post‐Brexit Asylum ‘Crisis’

    Open AccessLucy Mayblin, T Davies et al.ARTICLEThe Political Quarterly2024Cited by: 2

    This article discusses post‐Brexit asylum policy in the UK. On the surface, Brexit had little impact on asylum, but Brexit, combined with the new phenomenon of small boat Channel crossings, created the conditions for a new and extreme UK policy agenda. It explains how politicians have sought to deliver border sovereignty performatively after Brexit by introducing extreme measures, ostensibly—though not practically—to stop small boat Channel cross…

  • Eco-coloniality and the violent environmentalism of the UK-France border

    Open AccessT Davies, Tesfalem Yemane et al.ARTICLEEnvironment and Planning D…2024Cited by: 7References: 56

    This article examines the eco-coloniality of the UK-France border by tracing the transformation of the notorious Calais "jungle" refugee camp into a nature reserve. We empirically investigate the ecological politics of the Calais borderzone, arguing that the environment plays a crucial role in both enacting and obscuring border violence. Based on long-term research at this site, we explore how the environment does political work by excluding, har…

  • The Politics of Injury: Debilitation and the Right to Maim at the EU Border

    Open AccessT Davies, Arshad Isakjee et al.ARTICLEGeopolitics2024Cited by: 13References: 52

    Borders are sites of mass injury. This article questions the necroconsensus that has emerged within migration studies, and explores the political role that less-than-deadly violence plays at contemporary borders. By withholding from outright killing, and thus avoiding the optics of public scrutiny, EU states are deploying a carefully calibrated politics of injury designed to control racialised groups through debilitation. The injuries produced th…

  • Epistemic Borderwork: Violent Pushbacks, Refugees, and the Politics of Knowledge at the EU Border

    Open AccessT Davies, Arshad Isakjee et al.ARTICLEAnnals of the American…2023Cited by: 51References: 66

    Borders are sites of epistemic struggle. Focusing on the illegal tactic of the “pushback,” which is routinely deployed by state authorities to forcefully expel asylum seekers from European Union territory without due process, this article explores the uneven politics of knowledge that helps to support or unsettle this clandestine border violence. Drawing on long-term qualitative research on the Croatia-Bosnia border, including interviews with pus…

  • The work of waste during Covid-19: Logics of public, environmental, and occupational health

    Open AccessEmma Garnett, Angeliki Balayannis et al.ARTICLECritical Public Health2022

    Waste has become a pivotal public health and environmental problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this interdisciplinary review, we move beyond the ‘coronalitter’ and ‘coronawaste’ discourses, which have come to dominate public imaginaries of waste, to consider less-visible dimensions of waste infrastructures and systems . We demonstrate how waste is coming to matter in new ways that offer opportunities for reconfiguring health research. By exa…

  • Nuclear Geographies and Nuclear Issues

    Open AccessBecky Alexis-Martin, Becky Alexis‐Martin et al.CHAPTERInternational Encyclopedia of…2021

    Nuclear geographies and geographers contemplate the significance of nuclear technologies and issues for humans, nonhumans, and ecologies in the past, present, and future. This definition highlights how radiation interacts across different scales and mobilities by considering the significance of their relations to humans, nonhumans, ecologies, and materialities. The field brings together diverse geographical approaches to understand nuclear medici…

  • Channel crossings: Offshoring asylum and the afterlife of empire in the Dover Strait

    Open AccessT Davies, Arshad Isakjee et al.ARTICLEEthnic and Racial Studies2021

    In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of stat…

  • Introduction to Part II

    Open AccessT DaviesCHAPTERToxic Truths2020

    Pollution surrounds us all. From the clothes we wear, to the way we travel, to our consumption choices, we are all -in highly uneven ways -creators and repositories of environmental damage. Toxicants have become increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life, and toxic potential suspends itself between absolute mundanity and perpetual threat. Yet despite the ever-present realities of contamination and environmental damage, pollution is often very diffi…

  • Introduction to Part IV

    Open AccessT DaviesCHAPTERToxic Truths2020

    Data is discard: in an uneven world of cloud-sourced devices, we are rendered data factories, spilling our information in real time to anyone who might be listening. Everything we tweet, "like," or Google has become a marketized product to be salvaged, mined, and rendered capital. Never before has the volume and velocity of data been so available and so open to manipulation. Some have argued that data has replaced oil as the world's most valuable…

  • Liberal Violence and the Racial Borders of the European Union

    Open AccessArshad Isakjee, T Davies et al.ARTICLEAntipode2020Cited by: 46References: 47

    This paper examines how racial violence underpins the European Union’s border regime. Drawing on two case studies, in northern France and the Balkans, we explore how border violence manifests in divergent ways: from the direct physical violence which is routine in Croatia, to more subtle forms of violence evident in the governance of migrants and refugees living informally in Calais, closer to Europe’s geopolitical centre. The use of violence aga…

  • Informal migrant camps

    T Davies, Arshad Isakjee et al.CHAPTERHandbook on Critical Geographies…2019

    This chapter situates the informal camp as a vital space of contemporary migration, discussing it in relation to more formal settings and theorizing the role of political inaction in their spatial politics. The chapter starts by highlighting different formations of the informal camp; from adjunct encampments near formal refugee sites; to urban squats in transit cities; to the widespread prevalence of ‘jungles’ as important spatial formations for …

  • Slow violence and toxic geographies: ‘Out of sight’ to whom

    Open AccessT DaviesARTICLEEnvironment and Planning C…2019Cited by: 108References: 47

    Toxic pollution is a form of violence. This article explores the gradual brutalities that communities surrounded by petrochemical infrastructure endure over time. Contributing to political geographies of violence and environmental justice, this paper puts the concept of ‘slow violence’ into critical comparison with work on ‘structural violence’. In doing so, the paper makes two key contributions: First, it emphasizes the intimate connections betw…

  • Instagram photography and the geography field course: Snapshots from Berlin

    T Davies, Colin Lorne et al.ARTICLEJournal of Geography in Higher…2019Cited by: 2References: 37

    Although geography has long associated itself with photography, the rapid advancement of technology has created a clear divide between the visual practices regularly used in wider society and the way photography is utilized by critical geographers in their teaching. We suggest the door is ajar for new modes of (geo)photographic thinking, and one visual tool at our disposal is social media applications that allow images to be instantly shared, ana…

  • Making Space for Failure in Geographic Research

    Open AccessElly Harrowell, T Davies et al.ARTICLEThe Professional Geographer2018

    The idea that field research is an inherently “messy” process has become widely accepted by geographers in recent years. In this article we push back against this, arguing that failure should be recognized as a central component of what it means to do qualitative geographical field research. This article seeks to use failure proactively and provocatively as a powerful resource to improve research practice and outcomes, reconsidering and giving vo…

  • Photography and Toxic Pollution: Exposing a Chemical Company

    T DaviesARTICLEScience as Culture2018Cited by: 2References: 10