Author: Maria Hagan
Maria Hagan is a DPhil candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on migration, humanitarianism and the regulation of encampment in France. She carried out six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Calais in 2017–18.

CALAIS, France – Most people associate asylum seekers in Calais with the notorious “Jungle.” It was a place of solidarity that appealed to the imagination, with its makeshift schools, mosques, restaurants and a church built by asylum seekers with the help of international volunteers. However, the Jungle was also rat-infested and filthy; it was a threatening, lawless place where people-smuggling networks thrived. (More…)