Anti-migrant discourse relies on an established notion of who is a migrant and who is not. This is a notion based not on the self-identification of the individuals concerned but on the preconceptions and/or political interests of the commentator. To point this out is not simply to call for academic deconstruction of taken-for-granted ideas.

Reeves’ fascinating and persuasively written ethnography explores the borders of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, today part of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The borders of the Ferghana Valley have regularly been depicted by academic and policy-oriented literature as too complicated in terms of their spatial patterns, too arbitrary with respect to the population groups they unite or separate, and not sufficiently delimited with regard to ambiguities arising from shared spaces.

In this interview, Holger Pötzsch and Chiara Brambilla discuss a range of theoretical and methodological issues in border research.

I write about Casey and Watkins’s very timely book, in the shadow of yet another staging of the US’s struggle with its imperial and racial history, on the one hand, and its project and promise to be a beacon of light for the "tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to be free"—to paraphrase—on the other hand. This book is a celebration, and invitation to a reaffirmation, of this project and promise.

I argue that we might consider asylum not as a process or a legal status, but as a material-discursive collective that takes shape differently across different spaces. The materials that constitute asylum – the forms, letters, certificates, bodies and belongings – take meaning and make meaning as they are enrolled in, and become part of, new spaces, discourses and practices.