Author: Eloise Thompson
In the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign-born workers contributed to maintaining the essential services on which the UK depends. They faced the double edge of public gratitude in contrast with insecure working and living conditions, compounded by often precarious immigration status. Recognizing the essential worker status could be a catalyst for transformative
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This blog takes a closer look at the category of key workers as a method to govern mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic. This category revealed and emphasized the ways in which mobility intersects with inequalities. Yet, while these inequalities were made visible at an extraordinary time, the pandemic was not
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Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, authorities deployed a myriad of “exceptional” measures that severely impacted the possibilities of human movement. States restricted, controlled and monitored people on the move at various social and spatial scales. The emerging “regime of (im)mobility” turned out to be highly differential and
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During a crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, there seems to be an instinctive turn towards sanctuary and roots. In 2020, repatriation flights and exceptions from travel restrictions allowed particular categories of travelers to return home. But our ideas about sanctuary are also restrictive, implicitly leaning on often racialized assumptions about
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