Thread by @heavencrawley

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/

Because we are good at what we do, very good, and because we have excellent relationships with our partners in 12 countries across Global South with whom we have worked closely for more than two years building the @MIDEQHub which means, above all, building our relationships 4/

We've done that despite the goalposts endlessly moving with additional reporting and auditing and scrutiny, despite COVID-19 hitting us all for six and deepening inequalities, despite conflict, poverty and unrest in many of the countries where our colleagues work. How? 5/

By working with brilliant researchers who are committed and capable, adaptive and flexible. Brilliant researchers who are capable, honest, open and working to make a difference in how some of the world's most difficult and challenging issues are understood and responded to 6/

There is no doubt that @GCRF funding has enabled us to do things that would not otherwise be possible, or even thinkable. It's inconceivable that nearly half way into project we fund ourselves under threat, precisely the point where our research is starting to yield insights 7/

Worse still we don't even know yet what the threat exactly consists of. Despite running world's largest migration project, despite having >100 @MIDEQHub researchers from around the world, I know as much as any of you do, from a public announcement on @UKRI_News website 8/

We knew the risks of @GCRF, tied as it is to ODA and, ultimately, government interests, but none of us expected the rug to be pulled from under our feet like this. We need clarity and information about what's going to be cut and we need it quickly 9/

This sentence worries me the most because it seems as though none of us are going to be allowed to continue as we expected and planed for and that many of us will have to agree to be 'reprofiled' or receive a formal notice of termination 10/
ukri.org/our-work/ukri-…

I always imagined that we would be able to resist government interference in our @MIDEQHub but it appears that you can potentially lose your @GCRF grant even when you are doing a brilliant job under nearly impossible circumstances 11/

I hoping that it won't come to that and the 'reprofiling' request will be kind. But we didn't design and build the @MIDEQHub to have it changed half way for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the research we are doing and everything to do with politics 12/12

It’s been five days now since we learnt via a public announcement of the #GCRF funding cuts. Since that time all of us involved in such projects have been trying to deal with the fallout. Many colleagues have been told the projects they spent months developing have been axed 13/

For the @MIDEQHub and others the wait - and uncertainty - goes on. Yesterday I had to tell >100 researchers and others involved in project what was going to happen. Only I couldn’t because we still don’t know 14/

This has driven a coach and horses through our efforts to build ‘equitable partnerships’ which, we’ve been repeatedly told by @UKRI_News, are vitally important. Indeed here is their own guidance on the matter ukri.org/about-us/polic…

This is how our @MIDEQHub partner in Burkina Faso feels about what I’ve just had to tell them:
“This is really violent information because we were not expecting it at all, and it calls into question the long-standing relationships of trust that we have built around this project”

And he is absolutely right. This is violence. Violence felt disproportionately by our partners in Global South for whom this work represents not just a livelihood but the opportunity to construct migration knowledge from a different perspective to the one that typically dominates

The North holds the power and continuously finds new ways to wield it in brutal ways

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