Laleh Khalili's latest manuscript, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024), gives breath to the complex and hidden life of seafaring. Khalili provides a vivid account of the lives of seafarers who power the vast global trade network, typically hidden from land-based consumers. The researcher embarked on two voyages, twenty months apart, aboard different CMA CGM ships travelling from Malta to Jabal Ali, Dubai. Using a mix of ethnographic notes, photographs, interviews, and archival materials, Khalili reveals the living conditions aboard these cargo ships.

"Humanitarian Borders" is an expression of Pallister-Wilkins’ anger at the limits of a liberal politics of rescue and a caution against seeing “life-saving efforts as a panacea or as a sustainable and just ‘solution’ to the violence and harm caused by unequal mobility.”

‍“Humanitarian Borders" helps us to close the geographical and conceptual distance between Mediterranean “deathscapes”, and my own land, girt by an increasingly violent sea, a world away.

Humanitarian Borders is an invitation to critically rethink (and begin to remake) humanitarian action with the ultimate aim of dismantling the ‘global colour line’.

Reading Pallister-Wilkins’ observations about care, control and rescue as core manifestations of both humanitarian and bordering practice alongside Black and Indigenous feminist theories, we learn how care is instrumentalized to mask inequity and violence.

Some care is revolutionary, and revolutionary struggles are rooted in an ethic of caring for and with. In the context of borders that kill, we need to pay attention to forms of care and life-saving that shrink borders.

"Humanitarian Borders" by Polly Pallister-Wilkins does many things, all of them beautifully. For me, it tells the story of an island, a looping “crisis”, and a carnival.

"Humanitarian Borders" offers us, in perhaps somewhat unexpected ways, the possibility to ‘think otherwise’ through consistently highlighting the inherent absurdity and obscenity of what Pallister-Wilkins terms the ‘humanitarianesque carnival.’

Invisible seaweed is at the heart of a contradiction in the marketing of American aquaculture: eat more seaweed! But also: seaweed is already in so many things that you eat!

The deep seabed is constructed as a place sans liveliness, where polymetallic nodules exist disconnected from human and/or nonhuman relationships, but representations, and the narratives they foster, matter.