Narrating European Border Control: Telling the Story of Frontex

Thursday 7 May 2026, 3.45pm
Zoom and The Mawby Room, Kellogg College

Sean Donnelly (Editor in Chief, Frontex)

How does an institution communicate what it does when an articulate public constituency contests not how it operates but whether it should exist at all? In this talk, Dr Sean Donnelly, a communications practitioner at Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, argues that the difficulty is not a messaging problem but a structural one: institutional and critical voices end up speaking past each other because they do not share the premises on which any resolution would be recognised as valid. Drawing on examples from the Agency's recent history, he asks what honest institutional speech might look like on irreducibly contested terrain.

Zoom registration link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/H4ejV-TqTE-_drNu8GkNwA

COMPAS Seminar Series Trinity Term 2026

Theme: ‘Immigration Enforcement in Practice’

Convened by Rob McNeil, Deputy Director, Migration Observatory.

These seminars will take place at 3.45pm on Thursdays of Weeks 2, 3, 4 and 7. Weeks 2, 4 and 7 are in the Mawby Room at Kellogg College; Week 3  is in the Investcorp Lecture Theatre, St Antony's College. All are hybrid with individual Zoom registration links (except Week 3). No registration is required to attend in person (except Week 3).

Migration scholars and activists are often highly critical of border regimes and enforcement practices, while political parties and governments often feel the need to make bold promises of “smashing gangs”, stopping unauthorised border crossings or enacting deterrent policies.

Media reports and policymakers commonly centre these discussions on either abstract political and legal debates or emotive humanitarian stories.

Those charged with enforcing immigration policies or scrutinising their actions face a challenging task in upholding domestic political decisions and international law.

This seminar series aims to explore the process of immigration enforcement from the point of view of those charged with enacting it in the UK and the EU, while also looking at the radical shifts that have occurred in immigration enforcement practices in the USA in the first year of the second Trump administration.

Attendance is free. To join online, registration is essential.