The recent events in Ceuta, marked by the deaths and suffering of those attempting to cross into Europe, have once again exposed the human consequences of its southern border regime.

Drawing on fieldwork and documentary filming carried out in Ceuta and Melilla in 2025, this talk places the present moment within the longer histories and shifting realities of these two Spanish cities in North Africa. Approaching them as borderlands, it considers the border not simply as a territorial line or physical fence, but as a changing configuration of material infrastructures, legal regimes, social relations and claims to sovereignty.

Through the experiences, memories and narratives of those who live alongside the border, the talk explores how borders are lived, negotiated and continually remade through mobility, separation and everyday relations.

It also considers the border as a space in which competing understandings of hospitality come into conflict: between Spain’s and Europe’s legal obligations towards those seeking protection, increasingly securitized responses to migration, and the hostility/hospitality that has emerged among sectors of the local population.

Against the backdrop of the recent events, it asks what “Fortress Europe” reveals about the changing forms of bordering, the assertion of sovereignty, the identities and relationships borders produce and fracture, and the human cost of maintaining them.

Moderation: Maria José Canelo (FLUC/CES)

Bio note

Parisa Delshad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Philology at the University of Salamanca. Her current research focuses on borders and war narratives in the media, intervention, and the political rupture between Iran and its diaspora, examining the circulation of these narratives among Iranian migrants within the wider Iranian diaspora and in specific territories. She is interested in analysing how the diasporic community frames hope, conflict and military intervention as possible or necessary paths towards political change in Iran. Her current work focuses on representations of the most recent events and the war involving Iran within diasporic spaces. Alongside various publications, Parisa Delshad is part of the European research project "European Hospitality in Film".