The Racial Borderscapes Series: this series explores the relationship between the racialised migration systems and the everyday life of borders. The series is co-ordinated by Professor Suzanne Hall.

Debates over racialisation and bordering often focus on formal, national regulations and how local implementation and resistance rations access to space and resources. Research into "xenophobic" exclusion across South Africa suggests recalibration along two dimensions: one spatial, one temporal.

First, while legal and political discourse often evoke national principles, exclusive speech and action can be highly spatialised and distinctly sub-national. Consequently, people objectively belonging to the same, racialised category (e.g., international migrants; sexual or ethnic minorities) face varied vulnerabilities corresponding to where they work or reside. The role of sub-national actors in "customising" categories generates a dynamic patchwork and suggests "co-authored" bordering practice. Second, it draws attention to the temporal elements of bordering. South Africa’s national political project rests on forms of restorative justice: of building futures for those materially disadvantaged and disenfranchised by Apartheid’s racist machinations. For South Africans, making claims to a future in place (i.e., in the country or a given site) are predicated on one’s position in this national temporal arc. Non-citizens are historiographically excluded from these claims. Immigrants are, in effect, run out of time.

Meet our speakers and chair

Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab (MGL). His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political communities across the Global South. 

Jean Pierre Misago is a researcher with the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on the effects of migration and displacement on identity and belonging; xenophobia and violent outsider exclusion; and management of migration and human mobility at local authority level. 

Suzanne Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation.