J Darling
Biographic Data
| ID | 70215 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Darling |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Darling |
| SIGNATURE | DARLING J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6406-9555 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 885 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Searching for Hope in Nativist Times’
Melanie Griffiths' paper presents a bold and critical challenge to the status quo of migration studies, particularly telling at a time of contentious politics, rising authoritarianism and the mainstreaming of racism in debates over migration. This intervention is timely for both academic and political reasons, accepting of course that the two are interwoven. Academically, as Griffiths notes, ‘migration studies’ as a named field of study has reach…
Thresholds of life in an Italian reception centre
In Undoing Nothing: Waiting for Asylum, Struggling for Relevance, Paolo Boccagni offers a detailed and forensic ethnography of the complexities of life for young migrant men as they move through an Italian reception facility. The book raises questions of race, gender, age, and identity, offering insight into how the cultural politics of migration, homemaking, and a desire for “real normality” among young men on the thresholds of adulthood and aut…
Support and Autonomy: Social Workers’ Approaches in Dutch Shelters for Female Survivors of Domestic Violence
It is not uncommon that women residing in Dutch shelters following domestic violence consider returning to their partners during the course of their stay. Social workers cannot prohibit return due to the importance of the client’s autonomy, as stated in the Code of Ethics. Simultaneously, social workers aim to ensure women’s safety and encourage a positive future, which can lead to tensions in their way of support-giving. Based on thirty-five int…
Competing Commitments: Experiences of Family Solidarity Among Women Leaving a Violent Relationship
Hotels, refuge, and the rise of carceral hospitality
Geographical work on hotels has foregrounded their role as spaces of commercial hospitality, leisure, and increasingly as sites of emergency accommodation for a range of displaced groups. Developing such work, this paper critically examines the central role of hotels in accommodating and containing asylum seekers and refugees. By considering the use of hotels in the UK and Australia, we argue that the hotel is a durable and vitally important site…
Areas of opportunity
Short Abstract This editorial introduces Area 's new editorial team and offers a collective sense of why Area continues to be an important outlet for geographical scholarship
Inexhaustible education: On supplementarity and a youth work “yet-to-come”
sponsorship: This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie [grant agreement No 956919]. (European Union|956919, Marie Curie Actions (MSCA)|956919)
Governing through partnership: Strategic migration partnerships and the politics of enrolment and ambivalence
This paper examines the role of partnerships in the governance of UK migration policy, considering how partnerships have been mobilised to navigate tensions between multiple state and non-state actors. The paper focuses on the work of regional strategic migration partnerships (SMPs) across the UK, bodies that bring together national and local government, statutory agencies, third sector organisations, and private contractors, all concerned with t…
Interview with Jonathan Darling, author of Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum (2022)
This conversation between Jonathan Darling and Sarah M. Hughes focuses on Darling's recently published book Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum (2022). Based on research conducted over the course of six years, Systems of Suffering examines the emergence, development, and implications of the dispersal system in the UK. This market-based system of asylum governance is a process that distributes asylum seekers to predominantly u…
Institutional Solidarity in The Netherlands: Examining the Role of Dutch Policies in Women with Migration Backgrounds’ Decisions to Leave a Violent Relationship
In The Netherlands, women who experience domestic violence can rely on public policies that aim to support them, such as shelters. Drawing on the lived experiences, through 10 interviews and observations, of women with different cultural backgrounds and nationalities staying in a shelter, and on 37 interviews with social workers working with these women, we observed that this support falls short for them. We argue that immigration rules, together…
Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum
The In-Between Spaces of Asylum and Migration: A Participatory Visual Approach
The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal
The Cautious Politics of “Humanizing” Refugee Research
In this intervention, I reflect on what it may mean to ‘humanize’ refugee research. The assumption often made is that ‘humanizing’ can arise through a concern with the particularity of the individual, through drawing from ‘the mass’ the narrative of the singular and employing this as a means to identify, , and potentially understand others. Yet such a move risks a reliance on creating relations of empathy and compassion that elide political respo…
Research Ethics for Human Geography: A Handbook for Students
Refugee urbanism: Seeing asylum “like a city”
This paper explores how asylum might be understood from an urban perspective. The paper focuses on a range of conceptual interventions mobilized around the notion of ‘seeing like a city’, which foreground the pragmatic and compositional nature of urban politics. These debates are placed in conversation with discussions over the changing nature of relations of power, to examine the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that current resear…
Sanctuary, presence, and the politics of urbanism
It has become relatively commonplace to claim that the world is becoming urban. However, it is only relatively recently that the domain of the urban has been considered as an area of study for those concerned with the politics of refugees. This chapter reflects on what is at stake in such work and presents an argument for exploring in more detail how a prosaic reading of the city as an ensemble of authorities, legalisations, and claims can help c…
Introduction – Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
This chapter introduces the main focus of the book, and discusses a range of current work exploring debates on migration, citizenship, and rights focused on sub-national spatial scales, including the urban, the neighbourhood, and the spaces of everyday life. The introduction thus examines some of the ways in which migration is experienced, politicised, and policed when framed as a concern for cities, communities, and everyday life, rather than pu…
The political is personal
Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘Curating Sociability’ for Refugees and Asylum Seekers
This paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees experience urban greenspaces. Whilst often overlooked in a focus on support services and integration, we argue that critically exploring the importance of urban greenspaces has wider implications for understanding how asylum seekers and refugees navigate experiences of displacement and resettlement. Drawing on empirical work foregrounding refugee experiences in Berlin, London, and Sheffield, we …
Refugees
Refugees are individuals or groups who have been forced to leave their home and have sought refuge across an international boundary. Refugees pose a series of challenges to nation‐states in terms of classification, accommodation, and human rights and critical questions for geographers about how refugees have been managed, governed, and constructed in the nation‐state system. The study of refugees includes examination of the history of refugee rec…
Species composition of First Nation whaling hunts in the Clayoquot Sound region of Vancouver Island as estimated through genetic analyses
Acts, ambiguities, and the labour of contesting citizenship
This afterword discusses a variety of approaches to exploring the contestation of citizenship, and foregrounds the spatial politics that underpin forms of contestation, struggle and claims making. Beginning with a reflection on how recent work has sought to explore citizenship ‘from below’, this afterword asks how citizenship studies might begin to accommodate an expanded range of sites, subjects and practices in the contestation of citizenship. …
Asylum in Austere Times: Instability, Privatization and Experimentation within the UK Asylum Dispersal System
In 2010, the UK government passed contracts for the provision of dispersal accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to three private providers. This article explores the causes and consequences of this process, arguing that dispersal has been reshaped through a confluence of 'austerity urbanism' and privatization. The article draws on fieldwork in four cities (Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sunderland), including interviews with …
Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence
This paper explores the relationship between forced migration and the city. The paper outlines four accounts of the city centred on: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the ‘re-scaling’ of borders, and the city as a sanctuary. Whilst valuable, these discussions maintain a focus on sovereign authority that tends to prioritize the policing of forced migration over the possibilities for contestation that also emerge t…
Privatising asylum: Neoliberalisation, Depoliticisation and the Governance of Forced Migration
This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK , arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper expl…
Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment
This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of 'compassionate repression'. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a 'deliberate policy of destitution', I ar…
A city of sanctuary: The relational re-imagining of Sheffieldâs asylum politics
In June 2007, the city of Sheffield officially declared itself to be the UK’s first ‘City of Sanctuary’, a gesture that sought to instil a spirit of ‘welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees’. Drawing on a series of interviews and ethnographic work, this paper critically examines this gesture by considering how City of Sanctuary sought to enact a relational account of place through which the responsibilities of Sheffield toward…
Giving space: Care, generosity and belonging in a UK asylum drop-in centre
Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation
Asylum in Austere Times: Instability, Privatization and Experimentation within the UK Asylum Dispersal System
In 2010, the UK government passed contracts for the provision of dispersal accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to three private providers. This article explores the causes and consequences of this process, arguing that dispersal has been reshaped through a confluence of 'austerity urbanism' and privatization. The article draws on fieldwork in four cities (Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sunderland), including interviews with …
Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
Asylum and the Post-Political: Domopolitics, Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship
This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post-political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper quest…
Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum
In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: That of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the…
The 'Minor' Politics of Rightful Presence: Justice and Relationality inCity of Sanctuary
This article examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are “made present” through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK. In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualizing and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of “rightful presence” as an alternative frame with which to address contemporary sanctuary practices. In contrast to a body of schola…
Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘Curating Sociability’ for Refugees and Asylum Seekers
This paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees experience urban greenspaces. Whilst often overlooked in a focus on support services and integration, we argue that critically exploring the importance of urban greenspaces has wider implications for understanding how asylum seekers and refugees navigate experiences of displacement and resettlement. Drawing on empirical work foregrounding refugee experiences in Berlin, London, and Sheffield, we …
Thinking Beyond Place: The Responsibilities of a Relational Spatial Politics
Although for many in contemporary human geography, it appears paradigmatic to conceive of space as a performed, networked, articulation of social relations; the political and ethical challenges of 'thinking space relationally' are only beginning to be considered. In this article, I attempt to review the account of spatial and political responsibilities elaborated through such writing, arguing that its focus upon spatial connections and flows deve…
Moral Urbanism, Asylum, and the Politics of Critique
The city of Sheffield was the UK's first 'City of Sanctuary', an identification which suggested that the city would act to welcome asylum seekers and refugees through promoting a 'culture of hospitality'. In this paper I seek to interrogate such claims and explore how the promotion of a language of hospitality marks a form of 'moral urbanism' through which the city is linked to specific values and obligations that enable the governmental ordering…
The politics of discretion: Authority and influence in asylum dispersal
Emotions, Encounters and Expectations: The Uncertain Ethics of 'The Field
Entering ‘the field’ can be a daunting, demanding and at times bewildering experience, with researchers negotiating a myriad of assumptions, expectations and motivations. Whilst early career researchers and doctoral students may be trained in theories of research practice, research design and ethical conduct, the realities of actually doing research often test the limits of such formal training and knowledge. In this practice note, I draw upon my…
Acts, ambiguities, and the labour of contesting citizenship
This afterword discusses a variety of approaches to exploring the contestation of citizenship, and foregrounds the spatial politics that underpin forms of contestation, struggle and claims making. Beginning with a reflection on how recent work has sought to explore citizenship ‘from below’, this afterword asks how citizenship studies might begin to accommodate an expanded range of sites, subjects and practices in the contestation of citizenship. …
From Hospitality to Presence
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan DarlingJonathan Darling is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. His research explores the politics of urban asylum and the practice of sanctuary movements and migrant rights' campaigns. E-mail: [email protected]
Refugee urbanism: Seeing asylum “like a city”
This paper explores how asylum might be understood from an urban perspective. The paper focuses on a range of conceptual interventions mobilized around the notion of ‘seeing like a city’, which foreground the pragmatic and compositional nature of urban politics. These debates are placed in conversation with discussions over the changing nature of relations of power, to examine the dispersal of asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that current resear…
Reading Angharad Closs Stephens's The Persistence of Nationalism. From imagined communities to urban encounters
Hotels, refuge, and the rise of carceral hospitality
Geographical work on hotels has foregrounded their role as spaces of commercial hospitality, leisure, and increasingly as sites of emergency accommodation for a range of displaced groups. Developing such work, this paper critically examines the central role of hotels in accommodating and containing asylum seekers and refugees. By considering the use of hotels in the UK and Australia, we argue that the hotel is a durable and vitally important site…
Institutional Solidarity in The Netherlands: Examining the Role of Dutch Policies in Women with Migration Backgrounds’ Decisions to Leave a Violent Relationship
In The Netherlands, women who experience domestic violence can rely on public policies that aim to support them, such as shelters. Drawing on the lived experiences, through 10 interviews and observations, of women with different cultural backgrounds and nationalities staying in a shelter, and on 37 interviews with social workers working with these women, we observed that this support falls short for them. We argue that immigration rules, together…
Governing through partnership: Strategic migration partnerships and the politics of enrolment and ambivalence
This paper examines the role of partnerships in the governance of UK migration policy, considering how partnerships have been mobilised to navigate tensions between multiple state and non-state actors. The paper focuses on the work of regional strategic migration partnerships (SMPs) across the UK, bodies that bring together national and local government, statutory agencies, third sector organisations, and private contractors, all concerned with t…
The Cautious Politics of “Humanizing” Refugee Research
In this intervention, I reflect on what it may mean to ‘humanize’ refugee research. The assumption often made is that ‘humanizing’ can arise through a concern with the particularity of the individual, through drawing from ‘the mass’ the narrative of the singular and employing this as a means to identify, , and potentially understand others. Yet such a move risks a reliance on creating relations of empathy and compassion that elide political respo…
Species composition of First Nation whaling hunts in the Clayoquot Sound region of Vancouver Island as estimated through genetic analyses
A city of sanctuary: The relational re-imagining of Sheffieldâs asylum politics
In June 2007, the city of Sheffield officially declared itself to be the UK’s first ‘City of Sanctuary’, a gesture that sought to instil a spirit of ‘welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees’. Drawing on a series of interviews and ethnographic work, this paper critically examines this gesture by considering how City of Sanctuary sought to enact a relational account of place through which the responsibilities of Sheffield toward…
Thinking Beyond Place: The Responsibilities of a Relational Spatial Politics
Although for many in contemporary human geography, it appears paradigmatic to conceive of space as a performed, networked, articulation of social relations; the political and ethical challenges of 'thinking space relationally' are only beginning to be considered. In this article, I attempt to review the account of spatial and political responsibilities elaborated through such writing, arguing that its focus upon spatial connections and flows deve…
Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment
This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of 'compassionate repression'. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a 'deliberate policy of destitution', I ar…
Teaching and Learning Guide for: Thinking Beyond Place: The Responsibilities of a Relational Spatial Politics
This guide accompanies the following article: Jonathan Darling, ‘Thinking Beyond Place: The Responsibilities of a Relational Spatial Politics’, Geography Compass 3(5) (2009): 1938–1954, doi: 10.1111/j.1749‐8198.2009.00262.x Author’s Introduction Accounts of space and place as relational constructions have become increasingly dominant within contemporary human geography as cities in particular are presented as sites situated within networks and fl…
Giving space: Care, generosity and belonging in a UK asylum drop-in centre
Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation
Psychometric characteristics of integrated multi-specialty examinations: Ebel ratings and unidimensionality
Over recent years, UK medical schools have moved to more integrated summative examinations. This paper analyses data from the written assessment of undergraduate medical students to investigate two key psychometric aspects of this type of high-stakes assessment. Firstly, the strength of the relationship between examiner predictions of item performance (as required under the Ebel standard setting method employed) and actual item performance (‘faci…
Moral Urbanism, Asylum, and the Politics of Critique
The city of Sheffield was the UK's first 'City of Sanctuary', an identification which suggested that the city would act to welcome asylum seekers and refugees through promoting a 'culture of hospitality'. In this paper I seek to interrogate such claims and explore how the promotion of a language of hospitality marks a form of 'moral urbanism' through which the city is linked to specific values and obligations that enable the governmental ordering…
The 'Minor' Politics of Rightful Presence: Justice and Relationality inCity of Sanctuary
This article examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are “made present” through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK. In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualizing and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of “rightful presence” as an alternative frame with which to address contemporary sanctuary practices. In contrast to a body of schola…
Emotions, Encounters and Expectations: The Uncertain Ethics of 'The Field
Entering ‘the field’ can be a daunting, demanding and at times bewildering experience, with researchers negotiating a myriad of assumptions, expectations and motivations. Whilst early career researchers and doctoral students may be trained in theories of research practice, research design and ethical conduct, the realities of actually doing research often test the limits of such formal training and knowledge. In this practice note, I draw upon my…
From Hospitality to Presence
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJonathan DarlingJonathan Darling is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. His research explores the politics of urban asylum and the practice of sanctuary movements and migrant rights' campaigns. E-mail: [email protected]
Asylum and the Post-Political: Domopolitics, Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship
This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post-political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper quest…
Reading Angharad Closs Stephens's The Persistence of Nationalism. From imagined communities to urban encounters
Another Letter from the Home Office: Reading the Material Politics of Asylum
In an era of technologically mediated modes of border enforcement, this paper focuses upon a seemingly more anachronistic mode of governmental intervention: That of the letter. Exploring the use of letters by the UK Border Agency to communicate decisions on asylum claims I argue that taking the materiality of the letter seriously demands a reworking of the politics of asylum. Drawing on ethnographic research within a UK asylum drop-in centre, the…
Asylum in Austere Times: Instability, Privatization and Experimentation within the UK Asylum Dispersal System
In 2010, the UK government passed contracts for the provision of dispersal accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to three private providers. This article explores the causes and consequences of this process, arguing that dispersal has been reshaped through a confluence of 'austerity urbanism' and privatization. The article draws on fieldwork in four cities (Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sunderland), including interviews with …
Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence
This paper explores the relationship between forced migration and the city. The paper outlines four accounts of the city centred on: displacement and the camp-city, dispersal and refugee resettlement, the ‘re-scaling’ of borders, and the city as a sanctuary. Whilst valuable, these discussions maintain a focus on sovereign authority that tends to prioritize the policing of forced migration over the possibilities for contestation that also emerge t…
Privatising asylum: Neoliberalisation, Depoliticisation and the Governance of Forced Migration
This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK , arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper expl…
Refugees
Refugees are individuals or groups who have been forced to leave their home and have sought refuge across an international boundary. Refugees pose a series of challenges to nation‐states in terms of classification, accommodation, and human rights and critical questions for geographers about how refugees have been managed, governed, and constructed in the nation‐state system. The study of refugees includes examination of the history of refugee rec…
Species composition of First Nation whaling hunts in the Clayoquot Sound region of Vancouver Island as estimated through genetic analyses
Acts, ambiguities, and the labour of contesting citizenship
This afterword discusses a variety of approaches to exploring the contestation of citizenship, and foregrounds the spatial politics that underpin forms of contestation, struggle and claims making. Beginning with a reflection on how recent work has sought to explore citizenship ‘from below’, this afterword asks how citizenship studies might begin to accommodate an expanded range of sites, subjects and practices in the contestation of citizenship. …
Sanctuary, presence, and the politics of urbanism
It has become relatively commonplace to claim that the world is becoming urban. However, it is only relatively recently that the domain of the urban has been considered as an area of study for those concerned with the politics of refugees. This chapter reflects on what is at stake in such work and presents an argument for exploring in more detail how a prosaic reading of the city as an ensemble of authorities, legalisations, and claims can help c…
Introduction – Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
This chapter introduces the main focus of the book, and discusses a range of current work exploring debates on migration, citizenship, and rights focused on sub-national spatial scales, including the urban, the neighbourhood, and the spaces of everyday life. The introduction thus examines some of the ways in which migration is experienced, politicised, and policed when framed as a concern for cities, communities, and everyday life, rather than pu…
The political is personal
Sanctuary cities and urban struggles: Rescaling migration, citizenship, and rights
Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘Curating Sociability’ for Refugees and Asylum Seekers
This paper examines how asylum seekers and refugees experience urban greenspaces. Whilst often overlooked in a focus on support services and integration, we argue that critically exploring the importance of urban greenspaces has wider implications for understanding how asylum seekers and refugees navigate experiences of displacement and resettlement. Drawing on empirical work foregrounding refugee experiences in Berlin, London, and Sheffield, we …
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (29 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Law (14 works) · Refugee (13 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (12 works) · Geography (10 works) · Psychology (10 works)