70 Banal dehumanisation by the rebels. Following the rejection of her asylum claim Anne spent the next three years living in total destitution, much of the time sleeping outside. In the UK, Anne is reported to have experienced further violence. At the time of the Still Human Still Here project, she had shelter but not security. She was living without any legal means of subsistence. Abbie Traylor-Smith describes Figure 5.2 as taken in a squat in Leeds, UK, home to a number of people who had been refused asylum. Some of those involved in the Still Human Still Here project had been professionals, activists and journalists before leaving their homes. Now in the UK and forbidden from working and from studying, they were stuck in a limbo. Where there was no legal means of subsistence, some turned to sex work or theft, for example, to cover daily needs. Some described living on the street without access to food, some were indentified as living on £2–£3 per week. Many had significant physical and psychological scars from violence they had experienced both before and after arriving in the UK. At the time of the project, all of them were reported to be destitute. In Figure 5.2 the stove is being used for cooking, but it also recalls the stove described in Heather Johnson’s 2015 paper, which was used to efface the finger prints of someone in such a limbo. Johnson opens the piece with a quotation: Take a strong painkiller. Then turn the front two oven rings of your oven on and wait until they are red hot. Then lay four fingers of your right hand on the right oven ring and the four fingers of the left on the left ring. Johnson describes the ‘fine lines’ of the finger prints as the borders between those assumed eligible for rights and protection and those assumed excluded. Both of these photographs are of mundane items. As has been shown, the experiences of those living with the items pictured can be driven by the extent to which their individual relationships with a particular State are recognised. In this way, they also recall the pile of belongings in Gohar Dashti’s photograph in Figure 3.2, the use to which they can be put is affected by dehumanisation and lack of recognition.37 When a person resides upon a territory effectively controlled by a particular State, s/he becomes vulnerable to that State in a very basic way. It is the State’s institutions that regulate social life and ensure that people can survive together. It regulates, and enforces the regulation of, persons’ behaviour. This includes the unavoidable activities of being human. And yet, the citizenism inherent in the way we understand our institutions of justice and politics allows that some basic 37 Heather Johnson (2015) ‘These Fine Lines: Locating Noncitizenship in Political Protest in Europe’, pp. 951–965 in Citizenship Studies 19(8). This example is taken up again in subsequent chapters.

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