“Minimum Distance Guidance”: Charity, Social Cleansing and Neoliberal Geographies of Discrimination

Holly-Gale Millette, University of Southampton, and Marie Billegrav-Bryant, filmmaker 

Tuesday 3rd March 2015

This talk considers a marginal people who have, for over 150 years, suffered a falsity of perception and paucity of representation within both the public sphere and the consciousness of history – the Inland Boat Dweller.

Theirs is a various and vacillating unofficial history that forms the very rhetoric through which they communicate and celebrate their communal identity, but their future histories are being imposed as dissident and resistant by a charitable organisation and ‘big society’ rhetoric.

We will consider current (and often silent) spate of social cleansing threatening the inland boat dweller in 2014. We offer stark images and discussion on how – by imposing “guidelines” and monetary “fines” on geography and movement – this indigenous and proud people is being hounded to extinction.