borders – Eldan Goldenberg

One island of the archipelago

2018-Feb-42018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • migration • politics / 1 Comment

Today I watched the People’s Tribunal outside the Northwest Detention Center. The testimonies were all stories about individuals currently detained there, told by people who had interviewed them this weekend, because the detainees aren’t allowed to speak for themselves. We heard painful accounts of the petty reasons people end up detained there, the barriers to their getting a fair hearing once caught up in the punitive immigration system, poor conditions in detention, and above all how the system dehumanises detainees and guards alike. I was reminded alternately of Josef K and Ivan Denisovich, two archetypes this country likes to pretend it’s above creating.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about. Hopefully you already know about the evils of the US immigration system, and the abuses at detention centers, and if you don’t then NWDC Resistance has a better backgrounder than I could write. I want to look at a question of geography: the location of the center itself, and all the ways it reminds us that the immigration system does not value our fellow prisoners.

Continue reading “One island of the archipelago” →

DACA

2018-Jan-222018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • migration • personal • politics • turkey / Comments Off

When I restarted this blog, I decided to focus on geography, and generally steer clear of either really personal posts or the political issues of the day. But sometimes that distinction doesn’t really hold up. The US’s treatment of people who were brought here as children is an example: it’s just the sort of current-politics issue I didn’t want to be talking about here, but it’s also somewhat on topic and so intensely personal for me that I can’t leave it alone.

I’ll start with some biographical information for context. I was born in Turkey, but when I was very young the country went through a period of political violence that my parents very reasonably decided that we should get away from. Because my great-grandfather had shrewdly taken advantage of the brief period when İstanbul was colonised, we had EU citizenship, so we were able to move to Britain as legal, documented, above-board immigrants. Thus my lifetime of being the most privileged sort of immigrant began before I could even speak in sentences. Continue reading “DACA” →

Navigating within Palestine

2017-Dec-142018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • getting on the map • gis / Comments Off

Palestinians in the Palestinian-administered parts of the West Bank live in a completely separate reality from Israelis just a few miles away, to the point that many roads are only open to one of those populations. This turns out to be a real challenge for crowdsourced navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps. Although the linked article makes much of the countries each service is based in, I find this more interesting as a study in the accidental politicisation of maps. I don’t think Waze is trying to handicap Palestinians; it’s stuck in a model of trying to show one consensus reality, when what’s a great route for one driver may be illegal or unacceptably dangerous for another.