Paper short abstract:

Injury is an everyday occurence at the northern French border, yet its nature and scale remain opaque. Mapping spaces of (formal and informal) care at the border and how the injured-in-transit navigate and experience them, this paper reflects on the politics of embodied harm and care.

Paper long abstract:

The deadliness of the English Channel has become particularly visible over the past few years, as border securitisation has been reinforced and the number of people who lose their lives at sea has increased. Less visible however are routine forms of maiming that people seeking to cross the France-UK border suffer. Policing strategies honed over the past decade have generated a situation where injury has become an everyday occurrence, yet its nature and scale remain opaque. In this paper, I discuss ethnographic research with injured people in spaces of care at the northern French border: a hospital, a clinic and most centrally a safehouse which hosts the injured upon their release from hospital. This is a space of recovery and respite from a life out of doors, where the formerly-injured support the newly-injured in navigating nodes of care in a hostile border environment. Through these experiences, I unpack how (formal and informal) care actors have adapted their practices to cater to border injury. I propose that by mapping spaces of care and how the injured-in-transit navigate and experience them, the absurd violence of the border environment cultivated by the French state may be revealed. The injured inhabit a paradoxical affective landscape, bearing the mark of the hostility of the state, while feeling relatively well cared for by medical institutions at the border. The paper invites reflection on the politics of injury in northern France, and how care actors might strategically cooperate to resist a downward spiral of violence.