This book explores the ways in which the state and private security firms contribute to the direct and structural harm of asylum seekers through policies and practices that result in states of perpetual destitution, exclusion, and neglect. By synthesising historic and contemporary public policy, criminological and sociological perspectives, political philosophy, and the direct experiential accounts of asylum seekers living within dispersed accommodation, this text exposes the complex and co-dependent relationship between the state’s social control aims and neoliberal imperatives of market expansion into the immigration control regime. The title borrows from former Home Secretary Theresa May’s pronouncement that the UK government aimed to foster a ‘hostile environment’ in its response to illegal immigration. While the Home Office later attempted to rebrand its hostile environment policy as a ‘compliant environment’, this book illustrates how aggressive approaches toward the management of asylum-seeking populations has effectively extended the hostile environment to those legally present within the UK. Through an examination of the expanded privatisation of dispersed asylum housing and the UK government’s reliance on contracts with private security firms like G4S and Serco, this book explores the lived realities of hostile environments as asylum seekers’ accounts reveal the human costs of marketised asylum accommodation programmes.

How migrants became the scapegoats of contemporary mainstream politics From the 1960s the UK’s immigration policy—introduced by both Labour and Tory governments—has been a toxic combination of racism and xenophobia. Maya Goodfellow tracks this history through to the present day, looking at both legislation and rhetoric, to show that distinct forms of racism and dehumanisation have produced a confused and draconian immigration system. She examines the arguments made against immigration in order to dismantle and challenge them. Through interviews with people trying to navigate the system, legal experts, politicians and campaigners, Goodfellow shows the devastating human costs of anti-immigration politics and argues for an alternative. The new edition includes an additional chapter, which explores the impacts of the 2019 election and the ongoing immigration enforcement during the coronavirus pandemic. Longlisted for the 2019 Jhalak Prize

In Paul Greci’s Hostile Territory, a catastrophic earthquake strands four teens in the Alaskan wilderness—and leaves them without a civilization to return to. Josh and three other campers at Simon Lake are high up on a mountain when an earthquake hits. The rest of the camp is wiped out in a moment—leaving Josh, Derrick, Brooke, and Shannon alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, with meager supplies, surrounded by dangerous Alaskan wildlife. After a few days, it’s clear no rescue is coming, and distant military activity in the skies suggests this natural disaster has triggered a political one. Josh and his fellow campers face a struggle for survival in their hike back home—to an America they might not recognize. An Imprint Book “In Greci’s intense survival tale with a thriller component, four teens endure a harrowing trek across the Alaskan wilderness . . . It’s clear that Greci (The Wild Lands) knows his landscape—Alaska’s beauty and natural hazards become their own vivid character in his handling.” —Publishers Weekly “Readers will feel like they are in Alaska alongside the characters... Recommended for teenagers who like postapocalyptic adventure or are fans of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet.” —School Library Journal

Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.

The dramatic split of the Hopi community of Orayvi in 1906 had lasting consequences not only for the people of Third Mesa but also for the very buildings around which they centered their lives. This book examines architectural and other effects of that split, using architectural change as a framework with which to understand social and cultural processes at prehistoric Southwestern pueblos. Catherine Cameron examines architectural change at Orayvi from 1871 to 1948, a period of great demographic and social upheaval. Her study is unique in its use of historic photographs to document and understand abandonment processes and apply that knowledge to prehistoric sites. Photos taken by tourists, missionaries, and early anthropologists during the late nineteenth century portray original structures, while later photos show how Orayvi buildings changed over a period of almost eighty years. Census data relating to house size and household configuration shed additional light on social change in the pueblo. Examining change at Orayvi afforded an opportunity to study the architectural effects of an event that must have happened many times in the past--the partial abandonment of a pueblo--by tracing the effects of sudden population decline on puebloan architecture. Cameron's work provides clues to how and why villages were abandoned and re-established repeatedly in the prehistoric Southwest as it offers a unique window on the relationship between Pueblo houses and the living people who occupied them.