Chapter 6 fully embraces the ‘ethnosemiotic’ analytical approach and takes a small corpus of London-French migrant blogs as its empirical basis. Developments in the migrants’ selfhood, belonging and positioning are explored using archived snapshots captured between 2009 and 2014. Through a granular multimodal lens, which re-adopts the habitat-habituation-habit triad, the chapter posits that rather than signifying a ‘cleft habitus’, visual, textual and/or typographical transformations common to the blogs reflect a collective London-French habitus that gestures towards hybridity. It acknowledges the materiality of the digital and the relational nature of London-French online/on-land experience, together with the predominance of women, who repurpose their blogs in a technomaterialist, xenofeminist turn. Despite challenges posed by the web-archival methodology, the chapter confirms the persistence of premigration habits identified on-land, alongside habituation to postmigration practices, including the culinary and cultural. As visual ‘geo-narratives’, the green and blue spaces depicted emerge as central to diasporic well-being and legitimate the normative selection of London as a long-term place of residence over Paris, as well as substantiating on-land research findings. The chapter argues that home and belonging in the postmigration space are presented in playful, optimistic terms, which projects an image of migration as a positive, if romanticised, move. The bloggers’ translanguaging practices are seen both to reproduce and transcend territorialisation, while coded ingroup iconography sheds light on migrant embedding and interpersonal relationships with pre- and postmigration communities. The affective atmosphere of the London-French blogosphere is, the chapter concludes, increasingly hybrid and as such mirrors participants’ on-land experience.

This chapter identifies the closely symbiotic relationship between strategy and technology, and the imperatives that each placed upon the other; critical factors for a state developing a nuclear capability on a shoestring (and little understood – then or now). Attlee’s near-obsessive secrecy impacted on both development and general understanding, and left a persistent legacy for the handling of nuclear deterrent policy within government, Parliament and in public. Both Attlee and Churchill were concerned about the moral implications of atomic weapons, but completely convinced they were necessary for Britain to retain her position and influence after the war. Neither chose to share this logic widely within Cabinet, let alone in public. Successive governments convened small, secret Cabinet committees to oversee major policy decisions, and completely ignored nascent anti-nuclear groups. Between 1964 and 1979 two Labour governments abrogated manifesto commitments to reduce/cancel nuclear commitments; Wilson’s introduced Polaris into service and Callaghan’s, faced with obsolescence of Polaris, continued updates and studied a replacement, despite having ‘renounced any intention of moving towards … a successor to’ Polaris. Both governments used carefully worded public and Parliamentary statements to convey apparent compliance with manifesto commitments despite doing almost the opposite, so naturally avoided public exploration of policy.

Chapter 2 is the first of three dedicated to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, deconstructed into a triad of habitat, habituation and habits. In this chapter, the migrants’ material habitat is the focus, and food emerges as a key element. Transporting French victuals to London homes allows the migrants to resist habitus transformation and assert a distinctive French identity, linked to the superior quality and perceived authenticity of French produce. It shows how the commonality of their personal artefacts and attitudes belie individuated strategies of transnational belonging and instead serve to construct a sense of community identity, albeit unwittingly. Through its emphasis on the participants’ material lifeworlds, the chapter challenges the well-established notion of ‘transnationalism’, particularly its foregrounding of abstract nationhood, and argues in favour of a more pinpointed, localised construct that acknowledges the intimate subject–object dynamics at play. The chapter contends that it is this attempt to recreate a sense of proximity to the familial primary habitat that participants have left behind which informs their choice of localised, consumable materialities. The final habitat dimension examined is the role of audiovisual media and their operationalisation as a textural, diasporic homemaking mechanism. Drawing on Schafer’s idea of the ‘soundscape’ and Appadurai’s intersecting ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’ and ‘ethnoscapes’, the chapter posits that the sounds and images of France permeating participants’ homes bridge time–space borders, allowing re-engagement with the cultural here-and-now of the homeland and a reconnection with primary-habitat memories. Complicated and ambiguous processes of emplacement, identity formation and belonging are thus substantiated.

This chapter considers the BBC decision not to broadcast The War Game; it is based on an interview with the director. The core message of The War Game, a 1965 BBC docu-drama on the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a Kent town, echoed a 1954 top secret Cabinet Office report that civil defence contingencies were completely inadequate. The film was withdrawn prior to transmission after the BBC consulted the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence. Peter Watkins (the director) resigned from the BBC in protest, and questions were raised in Parliament and in the media, leading to extensive public debate, in which an unofficial pro-government case was made by proxies. The documentary was given a limited cinematic release, winning the 1966 Venice Film Festival Award for best documentary, and the 1967 best documentary Oscar. The BBC screened it in 1985. The director insists still that the film was suppressed because of its political impact. Whatever the BBC decided, it decided only after extensive consultation with government officials, which both denied publicly. The withdrawal of The War Game highlighted the almost total government public silence on nuclear weapons, but even then the government did not participate in public discussion.

India is an egg donation ‘hot spot’, which relies on some of the country’s poorest women to source its gametes – yet it remains legally unregulated. Given that egg donors’ experiences rely on the discretion of fertility clinics, it is imperative to analyse the meso-micro interactions between clinic institutions and low-income women. This chapter analyses how commercial egg donation is organised in unregulated fertility markets, such as Kolkata, India, and what the implications are on donors’ wellbeing. Harnessing in-depth interviews and participant observation at a fertility clinic in Kolkata, it unpacks the theoretical potentiality of agency bound by financial desperation, unequal gendered positions, and institutional imposition. In doing so, it illuminates how clinics structure a donor market incentivising low-income women while also strategically distancing themselves from these networks of women. This neglect from the clinic has severe consequences for the wellbeing and safety of donors, which in turn compromises their ownership over their bodily labour. It argues that greater institutional accountability for clinics is fundamental to recentring donors’ agency. Overall, the chapter reinforces a need for contextual specificity to develop meaningful discourses about women’s bodily labour in the global south.

This chapter investigates how genomic practices can reinforce population thinking beyond the lab, looking particularly at how social divisions are essentialised as biological categories in India. The case chosen is the media discourse surrounding DNA recovered from skeletons belonging to the Indus Valley Civilisation, a sophisticated urban civilisation that flourished in the North West of the Indian Subcontinent between 3300 and 1300 BCE. Debates in the Indian media revolve around the question of indigeneity and the idea of an unbroken lineage of Hindus versus invaders and colonisers. These theorisations of a genetic re-inscription of population groups are bolstered by archaeological evidence and linguistic theories, which have historically resulted in politically charged debates. Through an analysis of 31 articles published in seven Indian newspapers and magazines, the chapter examines ways in which genetic evidence has been mobilised to argue for either an ‘Aryan Migration Theory’ or an indigenous Vedic culture while normatively classifying populations as ‘indigenous’, ‘Aryan’, ‘Dravidian’, ‘upper-caste’, among others. It argues that the popularisation of biomedical ideas of race poses potentially dangerous consequences for India, as ancient DNA testing is used to make arguments against those who ‘do not belong’ and as justification for various forms of political repression.

This book addresses why successive British governments have struggled to sustain public discourse on nuclear weapons policy and strategy. This reflects aversion to debate the conditional willingness to threaten non-combatants, dating back to debates during the First and Second World Wars. Whilst every government since 1915 has been prepared to exploit such strategies, they have been averse to acknowledging them. This is as true of 21st-century nuclear deterrence as it was of strategic bombing in the Second World War. This book explores modern and historical deterrence strategy, the ethics of nuclear deterrence, the public debate about strategic bombing and nuclear deterrence, the effects on public discourse of modern media and the relationship between these elements. In war, government faces a paradox demanding consequentialist judgement, which is difficult for it to portray in public, especially through modern media. Governments therefore avoid the issue and have occasionally lied to the public. This inability to articulate the strategic case for the nuclear deterrent undermines its coherence and increases the risk that decisions on its future may be taken without understanding the strategic imperatives, based on discussions of cost and capability within debate parameters dictated by a vocal minority.

This chapter conceptualises border abolitionism as an analytical standpoint for rethinking a critique of the border regime which highlights the confinement continuum that targets migrants and which retraces the genealogy of struggles for movement. The chapter combines critical migration literature, Black abolitionism and feminist carceral abolitionism scholarship. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of ‘abolition democracy’, recently used also by Angela Davis for developing a critique of the carceral system, it contends that an abolitionist approach to bordering mechanisms should not be narrowed to calls for abolishing borders; rather, it involves moving beyond an individualistic understanding of the right to mobility and framing this as part of processes of commoning.

The Conclusion reflects on the book as a whole and considers how major changes to the London diasporic space, instigated by the post-2016 political landscape, renders it a work of contemporary history as much as ethnography. It underscores the distinctiveness of the migrant group examined and the book’s theoretical contribution to the field of migration studies. The Conclusion reminds readers how participants’ narratives exposed powerful, if latent, ideological and affective forces, and how their aspirations were projected onto the diasporic space so that the homeland, particularly Paris, emerged as comparatively hostile, unsafe, judgemental and segregated, whereas London was apprehended as open, secure, liberated and (super)diverse. This normative evaluation process, it contends, produced a sense of embeddedness and diasporic belonging in pre-EU-referendum London. The chapter also discusses the meanings garnered from the book’s blended ethnographic methodology arguing that online diasporic spaces function as microcosms for the wider London-French experience and that cultural and linguistic situatedness ultimately constrains hybridisation. It recommends several future areas of enquiry, including those related to Brexit, to London-French sub-communities and/or to new digital methodologies, again drawing on archived web material. To finish, it returns to the words of the migrants’ themselves and provides a range of responses to the ‘London-in-a-nutshell’ interview question, which sums up the overall appeal of London as a migratory destination at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Despite the Human Genome Project in 2000 discovering that there is no hereditary distinction between races, the naturalised bio-centric conception of race continues to pervade society. One such area where this happens is during the egg donation process, which is a part of the growing industry of assisted reproductive technologies. This chapter argues that the role race plays in the egg donor selection process is central. Both recipients and donor agents employ racial categories in order to find an egg donor that racially matches the patient, which is the phenomenon of racial-matching. This phenomenon, the chapter argues, is a process of neo-eugenics. Whilst many think of ‘better birth’ at the mention of the term eugenics, this chapter makes the argument that racial matching mimics eugenic practices of maintaining the myth of racial purity. Donor agents speak of an ‘obviousness’ of the use of racial categories, naturalising race as biological and seemingly legitimising hegemonic notions of the family. The egg donor selection process conceals the power dynamics it perpetuates in the discourse of resemblance. Assisted reproductive technologies have brought treatment and hope to those struggling with infertility and indicate the advancement of science and technology within the health sector. However, the persisting power dynamics surrounding race and desirability have come to manifest themselves within these technologies, indicating that as time changes, the discourse within medicine and science shifts itself to accommodate the politics of the time.

This torrid period saw the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament re-emerge as part of a pan-European protest against NATO nuclear weapons, NATO’s dual track response to the deployment of SS20 and the near-simultaneous decision to replace Polaris with Trident. Many technical factors affecting the Polaris decision remained relevant, including the need to use an American system because the R&D costs of a British system would be prohibitive. Mrs Thatcher’s government persisted in treating decisions about NATO nuclear posture and the national nuclear deterrent as separate, missing the point that they were indivisible in public perception. The anti-nuclear opposition mounted coherent campaigns locally and nationally, and the government did not attempt to engage for three years – by which time the debate’s parameters had been set by CND and others. Throughout, ministers’ understanding of the discourse was woeful, with the Press Office failing to grasp the importance, or the complexity, of the issue until a small Conservative Party committee began work on the 1983 election manifesto. This committee engaged with the Cabinet Office and the MOD, and government took an aggressive stance, aiming to undermine the credibility of anti-nuclear lobbies by suggesting their leadership was significantly influenced by the USSR.

Chapter 5 tends towards a blended ethnographic approach and returns to the theme of education, through the theoretical prism of symbolic violence. The first half of the chapter is dedicated to on-land participants’ attitudes to education in France and London, and the second half compares online representations of three London-based schools frequented by participants or their children: the Lycée Français; Newham Sixth-form College and Whitgift School. The chapter argues that the French and UK education systems serve as microcosms for the respective societies’ approaches to migration, nationalism and citizenship. Universalist Republican values are at the core of the French school system, where the assimilationist citizenship model is reproduced through an exclusionary, didactic, positivist educational epistemology. Conversely, London’s multiculturalist social model is transferred to its classrooms through the adoption of a constructivist, student-centred pedagogy. The chapter contends that despite the French model’s egalitarian tenets, it remains a highly competitive system, with an emphasis on achieving success through reprimand rather than encouragement. This causes many French Londoners to turn towards the English model for their own progeny. The multimodal online analysis supports the on-land findings, with an under-representation of ethnic minorities and a lack of creative opportunities evinced on the Lycée website, set against the celebration of individual achievement, inclusivity and creative capital on the NewVIc and Whitgift landing pages. Migrants’ favouring of the UK system – for primary education at least – thus replicates the rationale behind their initial migration to London, with perceived openness, meritocracy and opportunity being potent incentives.