I’m joining colleagues from across West and East Africa to hold a mirror up to Europe’s migration policies at @FriendsofEurope conference. Nothing has changed since our @ESRC funded #MEDMIG research despite clear evidence that EU policies are deeply flawed friendsofeurope.org/events/african…
European policies assume that people ‘choose’ Europe based on a strategic and well-informed assessment of laws and policies and that anyone who exerts any agency is ‘undeserving’ of protection or even human treatment. But decision making is complicated onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
EU policies also both implicitly and explicitly support regimes and policies that undermine the rights of refugees and migrants in interests of preventing them from seeking protection and/or a better life. There is no ‘Common Agenda’ only Europe’s agenda tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
If you are interested in findings of #MEDMIG project then take a look at our website medmig.info Sadly you will see that the detailed evidence we gathere from 500 people in 2015 has been utterly disregarded in EU policy thinking - along with a myriad of other studies
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Like everyone else who leads/works with @GCRF funded projects, I'm reeling from news that our budgets are to be slashed and grants terminated. We learnt about this through a public announcement on the @UKRI_News, no-one even had decency to consult with or advise us beforehand 1/
This announcement was made, ironically, on the very same day that we made our ResearchFish submission, a hellish bureaucratic system of reporting our outputs, engagements and impacts so that we can 'prove' to @UKRI_News that we are doing what we said we would do with the money 2/
Our @MIDEQHub ResearchFish submission ran to more than 250 pages of publications and engagement activities with impacts on policy debates, training, media outputs and more, all carefully documented, detailed and entered into the system 3/
'The artist and the professor, the mother and the wife' is now online for all to see. This collaboration with @LauraNyahuye of @maokwo was one of the most intense experiences, personal or professional, of my entire life and my feelings about 'going public' are mixed ...(1/?)
On the one hand I feel incredibly proud (a word I generally avoid) of the beautiful things that we have created together. I'm overwhelmed by the beauty in fact. The images. The words. These were created in the intense lockdown days and they take me back to that place...(2/?)
The lockdown forced us to stop and reflect on our lives and the work we both do in ways that would never have happened otherwise. Being forced to 'Stop', to have the opportunity to 'Breathe' was a major theme and recurring theme of our collaboration (3/?) theartistandtheprof.art.blog/2020/07/03/sto…
Funded by @covcampus@warwickuni as part of @Coventry2021 this collaboration has been undertaken entirely online during the #COVID19#lockdown It's been a powerful and challenging experience for many different reasons. We've laughed and cried, written and woven... (2/?)
For both of us this is the first time that we've had an opportunity to #stop#breathe#pause and reflect on the ways in which our own and societal expectations of gendered and racialized roles and responsibilities have shaped our lives #morethanalabel#beyondcategories (3/?)
My latest @scmrjems article with Katharine Jones draws on our #MEDMIG data to unpack the idea that the places people move to outside Europe are always 'in-between' and never intended as 'destinations', an idea that feeds into anti-immigrant discourses... tandfonline.com/eprint/MCBPYQ2…
Treating these places as 'in-between' reinforces the notion that 'everyone' is heading to Europe when they very clearly are not. In reality most people remain in the same region and rebuild their lives in these places. The notion of 'transit countries' serves the same purpose
Our evidence suggests that it is only when life becomes untenable and a decision is made to move that these places take on a state of ‘in-betweenness’, most commonly as part of a personal narrative mobilised by migrants to make sense of the broader arc of their life experiences
Yesterday's speech by @antonioguterres hit so many nails on head. #COVID-19 is shining spotlight on global injustices and issues ignored for decades: inadequate health systems; structural inequalities; environmental degradation; the climate crisis un.org/sg/en/content/…
#COVID19 is not 'the great equaliser', we are not 'all in the same boat'
Importantly @antonioguterres points to long term inequalities associated with colonisation and the unequal incorporation of countries into the global economic system as a key causal factor. It's rare to have such explicit acknowledgement of how we came to be in this mess
Never tried to live tweet from an online event but 4th UNESCO Chair currently being live-streamed contains powerful and moving material which speaks to me strongly in the context of #RefugeeWeek2020 and more generally and needs to be heard so I’m going to give it a try...
The words and experiences of refugees frame everything that’s being said but within that the gendering of refugee experiences, of human experiences of forced movement, relations between mothers and children
Integration is such a difficult concept, one of things that the team tries to do - and has done over previous lectures - is to introduce new ways of thinking about integration. The theme for this year’s lecture is ‘contemplative seeing’ as a way of reflecting on these processes