This paper examines how borders are discursively reproduced in representations of the 'refugee crisis' in the German media. Based on an extensive content and discourse analysis of German press representations in 2015 and 2016, we argue that the discourse of crisis obscures the reasons for migration and instead shifts the focus to the advantages and disadvantages that refugees are assumed to bring to their host country. More specifically, we contend that press discourses construct a figure of the (un)deserving refugee around three key themes: economic productivity, state security and gender relations. In doing so, we illustrate how the framing of some lives as more or less deserving of protection than others directly mirrors and extends the humanitarian securitization of borders into public discourse.

This article discusses how arts practitioners reflect on their work amidst deepening economic inequality. Given the renewed interest in the social role of arts institutions under conditions of financialised neo-liberalism, the paper traces the complex ways in which economic imperatives figure in cultural practice. Drawing on interviews with UK-based gallery directors, museum curators, art consultants, and artists, I map out how austerity politics and intensifying privatisation processes have a profound impact on the workings of the sector, how they recalibrate dynamics between private and public artworlds, and how they shape processes of production and curation. My data specifically document how increasing economic precarity brings into relief structural inequalities of gender, race and (post)-colonial legacies already manifesting in the artworld. Rather than understanding austerity as a financial condition only, the paper thus presents an empirical exploration of the wider inequalities that it has exacerbated, from arts funding to institutions' programming practices.

This article reflects on the current status of art’s critical power in a world of intensifying economic inequality. We document how the art world is saturated with economic imperatives that limit the power of conventional artistic critique to meaningfully contest economic instrumentalism. Such imperatives also constrain both artistic and curatorial choices, with profound implications for questions of representation. Informed by interviews with artists, curators and managers of leading art institutions in London, we outline an emergent politics that acknowledges the way that inequalities are sustained and accumulate over long periods of time and is committed to addressing ‘historic wrongs’. We argue that an especially powerful dimension here is geographical, with institutions reconsidering their own historical and contemporary locations as a means of subverting universalising narratives that mask dominant power. We suggest that this focus on spatiality presents a promising approach to addressing contemporary inequalities in the art world by being able to productively link concerns around representation to a critical recognition of the spatially located impact of economic inequality.

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