Professor of Digital Economy and Culture; Head of Department of Marketing
A new book from the School of Business and Management charts the 100-year history of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ and examines how this de-humanising culture could be perpetuated or tackled in the digital economy.
“When we think about marketing, we tend to think about demand and supply, and markets and consumption. But if you look at consumption it’s a space of intense politics of inclusion, exclusion, segmentation and differentiation. And coming to the digital economy, the market becomes even more complex,” says Professor Yasmin Ibrahim, Head of Department of Marketing at Queen Mary’s School of Business and Marketing.
“If you look at the history of soap, for example, the colonial empires opened up new terrains in which consumption happened by telling them, ‘You are the great unwashed. You need to be cleaned. You need to be humanised’.”
Professor Ibrahim’s research focuses on new media and the digital economy, and what it means to be human in a digital landscape. Her new book, Migrants and Refugees at UK Borders: Hostility and ‘Unmaking’ the Human, examines how refugees and migrants have been stripped of their humanity by society over the last century.
She explains: “Migration for me harks back to my own background. My father was a teenage migrant who travelled to Singapore to find work due to poverty in India. While I'm not an economic migrant, I know that just because people are trying to escape famine, conflict or economic disparities, this doesn't mean we take away their dignity.”
Both through her research at Queen Mary and in her community service in east London, Professor Ibrahim sees the difficulties faced by people who move to the UK and their descendants as a result of the ‘hostile environment’.
“One of the things I want readers to understand is that what is happening now isn't a flash of a moment. It's been happening cumulatively over time, and it's got more than 100 years of history in terms of the policy sphere,” Professor Ibrahim says. “I wanted to trace the regulations that have been put in place from the Aliens Act of 1905 to Priti Patel's notion of Rwanda as the solution for people who are caught crossing the English Channel in small boats.”
Studying this history, Professor Ibrahim came to realise that hostility is not only present in the rules that govern entry to the country; it infiltrates all aspects of normal life meaning people must be vetted numerous times in order to access facilities such as housing and banking.
Migrants or refugees are faced with the accusation that they are exploiting the system, even if they are seeking potentially lifesaving treatment from the NHS. Professor Ibrahim adds: “For example, the pandemic opened up issues of migration in ways that people could not even imagine. Who died first? The people who were doing precarious work and these people were the racialised migrants.
“Even within professional work like medicine, we saw the Black, Asian and minority ethnic doctors becoming victims of this pandemic because they were serving on the frontline. We are talking about years and years of structural racism that's encoded into this. And I think the book unpacks all the different dimensions of that, whether it's through policy enactments, whether it's through the context of what hostility means, or through parliamentary debates of who is human and who isn't.”
Professor Ibhrahim’s book explores the effects of COVID-19 as well as Brexit and the ‘migrant crisis’ in the UK and the rest of Europe. She analyses the rhetoric used by politicians and the media to describe migrants, refugees and their treatment, with chapters that cover the Calais ‘jungle’, the small boats crossing the English Channel and detention camps.
She continues: “Today, we can't just look at the physical landscape in terms of migration because we've got other virtual phenomena happening in tandem in the digital economy. The ways in which we represent people, the ways in which we understand issues, and the waves of moral panic that used to come through print and television have taken on a whole new dimension with social media platforms.
“So even if you've never met somebody who's come from a conflict zone to find a mode of survival here in the UK, you will see them being represented in denigrative ways through Tik Tok and other platforms.”
Despite this, Professor Ibrahim still finds reason for hope among the students she teaches. “I think young people are capable of enormous compassion, empathy and understanding. They have grown up with technology in their everyday lives and have a different way of engaging with technological platforms, and they will equally use it to counter many of these negative elements.”