 Good evening everybody I can see participants entering I'm going to wait just a minute or so for some more audience to arrive and start again and then start. Okay good evening I think we should start I can't wait I'm so excited about this session. This evening we're talking about poverty insecurity and migration. And in the context of the covert 19 problems. So we'll be addressing issues which we might call a syndemic, what happens when various difficulties come together coalesce and combine to cause problems. There may be some debate among my panel members I don't know about the my use of the word syndemic. So I'm going to introduce all four speakers. Now, and then they will speak in turn for about 10 minutes each, and then we'll have about an hour for questions. I would ask you please to use the question and answer function. We won't be responding to material that you put onto the chat. I'll allow you to put place your questions in the question answer and we'll deal with those when all four speakers have spoken. So I'm going to introduce the speakers to you now. We have two world leaders and two junior academics if I may put it that way. So it's a brilliant balance. The first one will lead. She is Professor at sauce in anthropology. Her research interests are food security conflict forced migration and diasporas. She is the challenge leader for security protracted conflict refugees and forced displacement for the global challenges research fund. She is an international development centers migration leadership team, and she's team leader for the research and evidence facility Hall of Africa window of the European Union trust fund for Africa. So you can see that she has she works throughout the world, particularly Africa, Europe, UK. She also is chair of the independent advisory group for country information. She's been in the Hall of Africa since 1993, with a particular emphasis on Ethiopia Somalia Somali land. And she's undertaken consultancy for a wide range of development and humanitarian organizations including undip US aid oxfam medicines or frontier, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program. So this place will come home refugee repatriation to Ethiopia, and she co-edited with your hand, but he and Christopher Kramer of researching violence in Africa, ethical and methodological challenges. Dr. Strayer Banerjee is our second participant. She recently completed her PhD from the center of gender studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, so us. I'm a gender feminist and women's studies from York University Toronto, Toronto and her thesis explored interstate and interregional marriage migration and trafficking in India. Presently she's looking at the impact of spatial regulation and gentrification on everyday lives of sex workers and their children in India, and how it transforms the patterns and processes of social reproduction. Her research interests are in the areas of post-colonial theory, transnational feminist thought, social anthropology, critical legal theory, spatial mobility politics, intersectionality and gender and sexual politics in South Asia and the diasporas. Our third speaker is Dr. Aisha Balkadi. She's a senior teaching fellow and research in School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and so on. Her research is characterized by two main strands, descriptive, theoretical and typological linguistics. Secondly, the languages and cultures of Algeria and North Africa. She's extensively focused on Berber, Amazigh, Afro-Asianic, a collection of languages indigenous to the Margreb and the Sahel regions. And she has strong expertise in Takbalit, Kabele, excuse my pronunciation, a language spoken by approximately 6 million people in Algeria, France and various global cities across the world, including London. Her research on Algerian languages is based on primary data collected from informants in Algeria and members of the Algerian diaspora in London. Aisha Balkadi is a Berber language consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary and creator of the homeschool grammar website providing linguistic grammar activities for children based on languages from the wider world. Professor Jonathan Goodhand is our final speaker. He's a professor in conflict and development studies in the Department of Development Studies at SARS. He has worked for some years managing humanitarian and development programs in conflict situations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and has extensive experience as a researcher and advisor in South and Central Asia for a range of NGOs and aid agencies including the BBC, ILO and UNDP. His research interests include the political economy of aid and conflict, borderlands, war economies and illicit drugs and war to peace transitions. He is the principal investigator of a GCRF funded project, Drugs and Disorder, building a sustainable peacetime economy in the aftermath of war. These are all amazing speakers, and I would like to give the floor now if I may to Laura Hammond. Laura, are you there? Hi, I am. Thank you very much Allison. Thanks for the nice introduction. I wanted to speak tonight about some work that I've been doing in the Horn of Africa with my colleagues, particularly with the research and evidence facility for the Horn of Africa, which is a team that I lead. We have about six people, core staff and then we work with researchers all over the region. And in particular, some of my remarks come from a paper that my colleague Luisa Brain has been working on. So I want to really give her full credit for some of the thoughts that are coming out of this. What I thought I would do is just speak about the impact of COVID-19. I know it's certainly impacting our research in the way that we have an ongoing research project and it's had some concrete sort of logistical challenges. I wanted to think about the ways in which the pandemic is affecting the lives of those who we work with as researchers who are research subjects research collaborators as well, and to suggest that we really need to take both to really be very upfront about using social science and thinking about social science or sort of social and economic aspects of people's lives when we look at the effects of the pandemic, but also then to suggest that we need to take a kind of nested look so looking not only at what happens in the immediate sense of kind of people's public health behavior, etc., but also more broadly at their changes in livelihood practices or changes in mobility and other kinds of things. So you'll see what I mean in a minute. I want to share my screen here to try to find the slide that I had which now seems to be missing. Hang on a second. That's quite odd. Seems to not be there anymore. Maybe I've got so many different things open I can't see it anymore. There it is. Okay. Yeah, so we I work in the Horn of Africa there are obviously quite a lot of people who are, who are on the move from various reasons. There are about 14 million displaced people within the horn itself, mostly just placed as a result of the conflict in ongoing conflict in Somalia as well as South Sudan. And then there's a kind of movement of people around the kind of Ethiopia Eritrea kind of neighborhood if you like that is another fixture so there's sort of three kind of displacement complexes if you like. And I don't want to, I'm not going to go into massive depth with regard to any of those particular populations but I just wanted to start to look at this region as a whole and sort of think about the ways in which the pandemic has affected people. So the first kinds of reports of COVID in the region really we started to be reported around mid-March sorry, 2020. And quite quickly, all countries in the region put some kind of border closure on. There was a real concern immediately as in other parts of the world with restricting people's mobility, making sure that people couldn't move between freely between from one country to another. So really, really important borders in this part of the world are both very porous, but they're also crucially important at keeping people's livelihoods going for in a number of ways, whether it's pastoralists needing to get access grazing area, whether it's small medium or large traders needing to get to get their goods from one side to another, people needing to get to labor markets, people needing to get to and from refugee camps, etc. So mobility is a really centrally important feature of this region. The, I should probably just put this on a presentation so you don't have to see all of my slides going forward. So there are immediately these these border closures, there are also varying levels of lockdown probably most tightly in Kenya and in Ethiopia, which also had the highest rates of transmission with school closures evening curfews, suspension of international and domestic flights, etc. And really kind of trying to protect, you know, keep people from moving. So that's had an impact of course across the whole population but for people. Again, who rely on mobility who are migrants or displace people or who just rely on regular forms of mobility. These restrictions were had a had a quite significant social and economic impact across the board. So if we just look at a sort of displace communities. Let's talk about what does it mean. What did it mean in the lives of people who are living in these places. In some cases, in most cases they are confined to camps or settlements. Most countries have kind of closed camp policies, particularly Kenya is probably the tightest where people are not allowed refugees who are registered in camp are not allowed to move in and out, or to go to the nearest city for instance or or to never be the capital. Unlike actually where refugees are able to move more freely. So they're confined to camps living in quite tightly tightly packed kind of highly dense populations with the photo kind of shows how houses are quite right next to each other many people living the same house very difficult course to maintain social distancing in an environment like that. We also have difficulty accessing things like adequate water and so. So the kinds of public health messages that we're have all been used to are outside the reach of many people who are who are living in displace conditions within the region. They're not able to access enough water to keep clean all the time. It's not something that is not available in all in all houses or in all households, particularly when people are on the move from one area to another face masks etc very difficult to have access to health care we know is already a very kind of sporadic and usually a very high quality in many of these communities and have in a pandemic or in any kind of a health public health emergency, the act in inability to access quality health care becomes even more important. See that because partly because people are blocked from finding ways of supporting themselves through accessing labor markets or other or markets to sell their goods or to move back and forth across borders. They become more and more dependent upon aid resources and those aid resources may be increasingly inadequate. So what we can see across the board in globally that there is a restriction a constraint constraining of the availability of international aid for emergencies partly because donor countries are focused on their own health emergency and are not making these these resources as accessible. And then finally many people who are displaced are relying on remittances as a life line and I'll come back to that in a second. And so my point about the kind of nested the ways in which we kind of unpack these impacts to focus on, you know, the live the lives or the, the experiences of people like those in this photograph are to think about what are the immediate impacts how how are people impacted by the kind of restraints on movement, the, the ability or inability to practice protective measures to protect themselves, etc. And those are kind of, you know, quite quite localized quite immediate. But I wanted to also suggest that there are in order to when we trace this out we need to think about the other kinds of kind of sometimes more nested or more internationally connected factors that also play a really important role and which this pandemic is not doesn't have just short term kinds of impacts but also has longer term impacts. So by that I mean that we need to look at what kinds of what's happening in the wider kind of regional national global economies and the ways, how is that impacting on the conditions of mobile populations. For instance as an example this photograph is not very good quality but it is a picture of a Kenyan farm worker, who is a labor migrant who is disposing of roses from the flower plantations in Kenya because of the collapse in the European demand for flowers. And this was also the case in Ethiopia, huge stocks had to be destroyed and many people who depended on employment in the flower industry lost their jobs and had to travel back to their communities. So you can see that that's something that has not to do with how many people are getting covered in Kenya, or how, how able that worker is to protect themselves but what's happening here in Europe in terms of demand overall. And that's been true with with food crops, as well, and with other kinds of international value chains. As well, I mentioned remittances briefly a minute ago, really important to think about the ways in which remittance chains have been affected so we see that many people have lost their jobs or have had to go on furlough or have had crises in their own immediate nuclear families in diaspora communities. So for instance I work a lot with the Somali community and Somali community was extremely heavily hit by COVID in the first wave this spring here in Europe, and their ability to send remittance money back to their relatives living in the Horn of Africa was severely constrained. So, again, you see that people have a lack of access to the income that they once relied on, because of not because of anything that's happening necessarily to them immediately in their communities but because of the changes that are felt in the diaspora. And then finally just wanted to mention this this bit about the environmental impacts of restricting mobility I think that one of the things that the work that I'm involved in is to try to think about how to come up with kind of appropriate recommendations for how to better to respond to COVID or other kinds of public health crises in displaced communities, and that's to say that we shouldn't just lock everybody down and try to keep them from moving because that can have really severe negative impacts, economic impacts overall, but to think about other kinds of ways of helping people to move more safely, helping to mitigate the impacts of their immobility, if there is such a thing. So environmental impacts of restricting mobility really start to play out here where people are not able to move as much for grazing for selling off their livestock etc and so there can be increased use of the natural resource base which can have a really significant impact on local economies. That's all I wanted to say but just to kind of again to reiterate the really important aspects of using the social sciences to unpack these impacts on mobile populations and as well to think about those kind of nested layers between this kind of local, national, regional and global sort of dynamics to really understand what the full impact of something like the COVID-19 pandemic can have on mobile populations. And there. I don't know Alison. Yeah, excellent so much. Thank you so much. I was muted. Sorry. Do you want me to come in or do you want me to pass on to the next speaker? I think if you could pass on now please to Sreya. And then at the end we'll bring you all back on screen. Thank you so much. Sreya, welcome. Thank you Alison. Thank you Laura for that insightful talk. I also want to just begin by thanking the organizers of this event for inviting me as a panelist and to just say that I'm very excited to be here. Okay, so the topic that I'm going to present today for this talk is certainly a work in progress and so I'm looking forward to any feedback comments and questions that we may have in the Q&A session. And I have just recently started to explore this topic, mainly for postdoctoral fellowship types of opportunities, but I'm also working on publishing some online blog posts and journal articles on the different sort of dimensions of the larger research topic. So the presentation I have here today focuses a lot more on COVID, the aspect of COVID than what I have proposed for my fellowship for instance. So yeah, I'll just begin. In October 7 2020, the National Human Rights Commission, advisory in India officially recognized sex workers as informal workers under the woman at work section, enabling them to access necessary beneficiary schemes and aids to tackle the daily impact of COVID-19. The recommendations for sex workers were advocated and submitted by the National Network of Sex Workers and umbrella organization in India. Based on the assessment of the various consequences of the pandemic and their impact on the rights and welfare of sex workers being a marginalized community. While this is a significant milestone for sex workers coalitions and their decade long advocacy in India. It is important to ask, why did it take several months for the government to address the vulnerable conditions of sex workers who have been struggling to live without adequate food, financial support, medical attention and shelter in this pandemic. To what extent has the pandemic shifted the facilitation arrangement and execution of sex work, and at the same time made work even more precarious. How do we rethink the laws key role in shaping the meaning and perceptions of women's reproductive labor in informal and intimate sectors such as sex work. To talk about these questions I will briefly drawn post colonial debates and socio legal approaches to sex work to understand how they have informed existing structural social economic and political inequalities, and also epistemic violence of sex workers, and to what they have been exacerbated in the COVID-19 crisis. Sex work is one of the oldest professions in India that has been historically pursued and operated by women and transgender groups. However, social perceptions and laws mobilized by the colonial state to regulate prostitution and then criminalize prostitute women contributed to a global panic and moral panic. Under colonial rule the British relied on Indian prostitutes to fulfill the desire sexual desires of their troops, hence they established special conditions to manage the practice of prostitution, but also ensure that a clear boundary is maintained between Indian mistresses and British wives to uphold their prestige as rulers of the nation. The tolerance and to some extent, acceptance of prostitutes by Indian communities left the British baffled. It motivated them to impose certain perspectives and conceptions of morality and sexuality to justify their control over Indian bodies and sexualities. Therefore, the eventual legalization of prostitution was an institutional strategy that permitted the regulation and management of Indian woman sexual and affective labor. In the contemporary and post-colonial context, the legacies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy have fostered various forms and layers of violence, which contributes to the vulnerabilities and subjugation of sex workers. As Western and international conceptualization of trafficking infiltrated Indian laws, the conflation of sex work and prostitution, migration and mobility became a common dilemma and the starting point of polarized disputes. At present, prostitution is considered legal in the Indian legal system and tolerated under the informal sector according to the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act 1986 or the ITPA, which is a primary legal legislative framework used to address prostitution. The ITPA prohibits the preservation of brothels, prostitution as a primary source of income, provoking or restraining someone for the purpose of sex work and prostitution and solicitation in social and public areas. Even now, sex work is not an illegal act, yet all the other activities that are necessary to sustain the business of sex work and perform sexual servitude as a form of reproductive labor are considered unlawful according to the ITPA. Nonetheless, these activities cannot be isolated and their persistence has developed a wide ranging positions, particularly amongst contemporary feminists on the question of prostitution in the Indian context. Sex work is highly stigmatized and made invisible because it is often linked to sexual and physical exploitation that are evident in human trafficking and situations of modern slavery. For over two decades, individuals, critical legal theorists and transnational feminist perspectives have argued against this perception and interpret sex work as a work that sex workers as agent of subjects choose to engage in as a form of livelihood and exercise their ability to navigate and negotiate institutional constraints. The law and the sex and sex work governance. They have worked within and beyond human rights law to examine the repercussions of inadequate and trafficking measures and understand multiple layers of migration and sex work through a political economy framework and some of the work that I look into and become inspired by are of Janet Halle, Prabhakar Deswarn and Ratna Kapoor. This is precisely where I locate myself as my work seeks to theorize sex work as a form of reproductive labor that should be defined and understood by critically analyzing the axis of consent choice and the market economy. While exploring questions of power agency and mobility. I'm interested in examining the laws approach to regulate and potentially eradicate sex, sex work that often begins with processes of gentrification and mobility management to understand how it contributes to the restructuring of sex work and shifts in social reproduction, particularly in the context of the present crisis. Through a critical legal perspective and an intersectional feminist lens. I think about how the right to work right to mobility and the right to space are intertwined for sex workers and influence their lived experiences of insecurity spatial conflict and exclusion. Although spatial practices of sex sex workers have been studied in existing research, very little has been explored in the Indian context about the connection between embodied spaces shifts in family structures and the sexual politics of domesticity, and how this shapes their emotional, political and intimate relations. Most importantly, there is limited empirical evidence demonstrating how children of sex workers experience and understand social spaces of displacement, isolation and social spatial politics. When movements of deteriorate territorialization take place or their embodied spaces are under threat. It is important to understand its impact on the capabilities of sex worker mothers to protect and care in such precarious circumstances. Hence the ways in which spaces used and appropriated by sex workers and their children are to a great extent entangled. I have children of sex workers and my study exact demands a closer look at how shifts in mobility, spatiality, family structure and domesticity in form new struggles and transformations in social reproduction care, and politics of intimate sex. The alternative positions of anti trafficking and abolitionist groups support the criminalization of sex work, arguing that is an extraction of labor through coercive violent and exploitative methods, which renders sex workers as victims and modern slaves without any trace or agency. These perspectives are being stimulated to intensify control measures and spatial regulation during the pandemic, implying that the eradication of sex work is one of the effective approaches to tackle the condition in India. Since a recently released study produced by researchers and scientists from Harvard Medical School, Yale School of Public Health and the Massachusetts General Hospital, suggested that red light district areas in five major cities of the country should be shut down to flatten the curve and reduce emerging COVID-19 cases by 72% and deaths by 63%. The public circulation of the study via popular media outlets offered scope for the police to threaten sex workers to permanently close brothels and restrict their means of income. This study is particularly controversial and misleading because it assumes that sex workers are primarily brothel based when in fact most are home based and street based sex workers operating from different places and engaged in other forms of labor outside of sex work. And a lot about this can be found in the book Street Corner Secrets by Shafati Shah that was published in 2014. Moreover, prohibiting physical contact as a method of protection and prevention may be exclusive to the context of the coronavirus. However, the conceptual and practical existence of social distancing is not new in a place like India where people are stigmatized and segregated because there are many disparities in gender, class, cost, sexuality, religion and ethnicity. For instance, for a large number of cost based and tribe based sex workers from the Bedia, Bachata and Bairna communities, sex work is their only source of income. This study was created and considered criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act in India. The authors of the study do not take into account how existing stigma and discrimination prevents sex workers to get a hospital bed or to have or to what extent is it realistic to believe that they will be a community prioritized when an effective vaccine becomes available given the nature of their profession. This is a webinar back in July, led by human rights activists sex workers, scholars and researchers in India that discuss the impact of the pandemic on the livelihood of bar dancers and sex workers. Dr. Sudhakar Noothi, who is one of the contributors of the Yale Harvard study was also invited as a panelist to expand his views and key arguments from the study. In my quote, medical institutions have put sex work in the highest risk category of professions for getting COVID-19. The only other occupations in in that highest risk category are medical workers. Sex workers will be highly risky for sex workers and cities until a vaccine is developed and widely distributed. Sex workers should be considered heroes by cities for stopping their work during the pandemic, and should be given financial support and re-employment programs during this period, given the impact of their business. We must find ways to create income without sex workers dying. This is the only solution to the crisis. Another panelist, including sex workers, responded by pointing out that shutting down red-lice districts implies that sex workers are considered a global health burden, which echoes the structural inequalities, discrimination and exclusion they faced in the colonial period and during the HIV epidemic. They questioned Dr. Noothi's point about pursuing alternative livelihoods and argued that most sex workers already have additional ways of earning an income, and that the assumption that this is something that they should be strictly implemented overlooks their agent capabilities. While the all-Indian network of sex workers specified that 60% or 3,000 sex workers in Delhi were forced to leave the city for their home states after suffering from a lack of food, medicine and financial support, sex workers in the webinar expressed that many of them could not, many of them cannot return home because they are unaware, because they are unwanted there. Several had been abandoned, trafficked or entered sex work after growing up as an orphan. While national human rights NGOs and sex worker-led organizations have been working tirelessly to provide dry ration, medicines, masks and sanitizers, however, it is difficult for many of them to claim these essentials from the government because they do not have adequate proof of identification such as the Aadhar card or a resident certificate. This is particularly concerning for both internal and cross-border migrant workers. Such everyday impacts of the pandemic have motivated many sex workers to transform the facilitation and practice of sex work, including shifting towards digital platforms. As pointed out by Mina Seishu, the founder of VAMP and Sangram, using online methods have proved to be risky because clients have used videos of the women to blackmail them, especially housewives or home-based sex workers who are invisible and wish to conceal their identity as a sex worker. Virtual sex workers have also struggled with obtaining payment and navigating the new territory of the online space, which is always uncertain. Obtaining access to these spaces and technological devices are also challenging, especially for elderly sex workers. These perspectives and debates around the right to work, right to mobility and the right to space are intergenerational and have been expanding or evolving across spatial and temporal domains. It is also important to critically think about the pandemic, the pragmatic impact of these discourses and measures. It is also important to think about their role in promoting epistemic violence. Meaning merely understanding sex workers as the other or gender and sexual minorities that are vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Or require those that are more educated, elite or located in the West to rescue and rehabilitate because they cannot understand, protect or survive on their own. A rights-based approach that considers sex workers as key stakeholders are necessary in any form of knowledge production that is concerned about the welfare, about their welfare and not about the physical existence of brothels. To prevent epistemic violence and pedagogical contributions would be to critically engage with the decolonization of knowledge. This is relevant to understanding how reductionist and monolithic representations of marginalized groups, particularly women of color are challenged and interrupted through kaleidoscopic consciousness, which is a term and a concept used by Jose Medina to recognize that knowledge is always in conflict and resistant to different perspectives of individuals and communities. But this is necessary for praxis to encourage constructive epistemic resistance and ensure accountability for epistemic flaws. Here, hence to imagine a post-pandemic future for sex workers requires taking into account their knowledge or different ways of knowing, which is, which has been explored in the book Epistemologies of the South by Desusif Santos, as a valid piece of evidence that is shaped by their struggles, resistance and lived experiences. Lastly, for research like this, I think SOAS is a perfect institution because it encourages multidisciplinary research rooted in critical thinking, collaborative approaches and global perspectives. I, it has equipped me as an early research career researcher to transcend barriers and foster transnational connections through my research. To locate my work at the intersection of gender, law and anthropology, the interdisciplinary backgrounds and expertise of faculty members across the gender studies anthropology and politics departments are particularly beneficial. What is even more exciting and fascinating is the new research that is being produced on sex workers in India and their experiences of gentrification, called the social life of sex workers in a gentrifying neighborhood of Kamathipura by Pooja Krishnakumar from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. I'm not sure if she's watching this, but I hope it's not upsetting that I have mentioned her work here. But yes, that's it for me. And I just like to pass it on to the next presenter. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much, Shreya. Fascinating work. I hope we can come back to that in the questions. Aisha, welcome. Hello. Hi. Hi, I'm going to share my screen now. Right. Okay, can you, can you all see, can you all see my, my PowerPoint? Yeah. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Alison, for inviting me to talk to in this panel and thank you for the people who have spoken before me. They were very interesting talks and I hope I haven't forgotten everything that I want to say because I was so fascinated by the previous talks. I think I hope I haven't forgotten everything that I want to say in my own talk. So I want to talk today about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on marginalized or minoritized linguistic communities or people across the world who speak minoritized languages. And there are a number of ways in which these communities have been impacted by the pandemic because of the languages that they speak. But I will focus on issues that relate to the kind of research that we do here at SOAS in the Department of Linguistics at SOAS. So one of the ways in which minoritized linguistic communities have been particularly affected by the pandemic is, you know, in relation to the issue of language endangerment. We estimate that there are about 7000 languages spoken across the world and 43% of these languages are endangered. It means that they are spoken by less than 1,000 people, some by less than 100 people. These speakers who speak these languages are, for the most part, elderly children do not acquire endangered languages. These languages are their first language. So the COVID-19, and particularly the high death toll from COVID-19, especially amongst older members of communities, especially in communities that live in remote areas across the world, in communities that have less access to health services, this death toll in these communities from COVID-19 has accentuated, accelerated the issue of language endangerment. There are languages that are at an increased risk of disappearing very soon because of the pandemic. Now, since the beginning of COVID-19 in March 2020, we've had reports that elderly members of communities speaking endangered Amazonian languages in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador have died from COVID-19 and with their death, of course, comes the disappearance of the languages, the indigenous languages that they speak. We've had similar reports in the south and the southeast of Asia, in particular, you know, about indigenous, the indigenous languages spoken by the great Andanamis people. We've had similar reports about Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia and closer to home here in Europe. We've had similar reports about a dialect spoken in Italy, the Lombard dialect. The other ways in which minoritized linguistic communities are negatively impacted or affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, because again, because of the language that they speak is with respect to health information. We know that many marginalized or minoritized linguistic communities have almost no access to COVID-19 information to health guidance or advice in their language, in the language that they speak. We don't have official numbers, but Mandana Saifedinipur from, you know, from SOAS, from the Ilar Archive at SOAS, and her colleague DiCarlo in March or April 2020, estimated that about half of the world, half of the people in the world do not have access to to COVID-19 information in their own language. Now, this is a serious issue for these individuals, but also for larger communities, because we know that with a disease like COVID-19, for which we don't have any cure or any vaccine, prevention is very important. And, you know, for prevention to be efficient, information has dissemination of information plays a crucial role. So if the information cannot be disseminated, is not disseminated in a language that is spoken and understood by half, but in language, I mean, it is not disseminated to half of the population of the world. This is quite problematic. Now, in this respect, there are actually some good news. There are many linguists and many organizations across the world that are, that have been working since the beginning of the pandemic, that have been working on the translation of vital, important COVID-19 information in minoritized languages, in Endangered languages, particularly the languages of Africa and Asia. And also, there's an organization from SOAS called Viral Languages, which is a website created in collaboration between the SOAS World Language Institute and the University of Buffalo in the United States. And another good news comes from Algeria, which is a country that I know very well because I work on this country and I work on the languages that are spoken there, and I know a little bit about the linguistic policies in Algeria. And Algeria, the government of Algeria is generally not, you know, very good, very interested in minority languages spoken in Algeria, particularly the Berber languages. And since the beginning of the pandemic, in fact, the government in Algeria is sort of making a lot of efforts in, you know, disseminating COVID-19 information in these minoritized languages, in the Berber languages. The government has, for instance, instructed local radios in local radios of different regions to disseminate COVID-19 information in the local Berber varieties spoken by the speakers. There's also a lot of young Berber speakers who share short videos, you know, giving COVID-19 information, COVID-19 advice in the different Berber languages that are spoken in Algeria. Another, you know, effect that or impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on linguistic minorities, you know, concern children and particularly children. I mean, I want to focus, you know, on children in the UK, but I'm sure that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected children from linguistic, from minoritized linguistic communities in other languages, in other countries, sorry. In the UK, the lockdown, the COVID-19 lockdown that occurred, you know, between March and March 2020 and July 2020 has led to the closure of schools. And these school closures have a number of studies and recent research have found that the school closures have accentuated educational inequalities, existing educational inequalities. And in a lot of cases, these educational inequalities, you know, affect or have affected children from families where English is not the main language, so has affected children from, you know, who speak a language in addition to English and also has affected children who speak varieties of English that are minoritized, so varieties of English that are not British standard English. And of course, the inequalities or, you know, the gap that exists between the gaps in learning that has been created by lockdown between these children who do not, whose family do not speak English or who do not speak, you know, British standard English and the other families where British standard English is spoken at home, these inequalities, these, you know, this widening of the learning gap is caused because in schools the language that is used in the UK in schools is British standard English. Everything is done in British standard English. And literacy, grammar learning is in British standard English. And so I during the, before the pandemic, I was already, you know, trying to think about how my own research on a diversity of languages from across the world on the grammar, the syntax, the semantic, the morphology of a diversity of languages, how my research could, you know, contribute to to sort of like diminishing these educational inequalities, but also to give children who do not speak standard varieties of English or who speak heritage languages here in the UK, how they could, you know, learn grammar, use their own language, their own varieties in their education. And so I created a website called a home school grammar, and I created it with the support of the SOAS World Language Institute and the linguistic department here at SOAS. And during lockdown, this website was created mainly to support parents and carers who were homeschooling, you know, their children. And one of its aims was to foster in children an interest in studying language and languages, but also to develop in them an understanding and respect of the world's diversity of languages, cultures, and knowledge. And so the website contains a range of activities that follow the UK Key Stage Two grammar curriculum. And the activities introduce a range of grammar concepts from the grammar curriculum in the UK Key Stage Two through a variety of the world's languages, including different varieties of English, and then languages, famous ancient languages, but also UK heritage languages. And that's all I have to say. Thank you and thank you as we say in Berber. So I think I can now let the next speaker speak. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Aitur. That's fascinating material. Jonathan, just before you begin, could I, could I ask people please, I would encourage you, if I may, to use the question and answer, because you may have questions which spontaneously come to you while a speaker is talking. And it would be lovely if we could have them on the question and answer session, and then we'll come back to them at the end. So welcome Jonathan. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. I was going to share the screen, but anyway, it's okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my, the experience we have in the drugs and disorder project. And just to give you a very short background, it's a four year global challenges research fund project. It's called drugs and disorder building sustainable peace time economies in the aftermath of war. And it's asking a base, a very big question it's asking how can war economies be transformed into peace economies with a focus on one of the key commodities driving war economies and that's illicit drugs. And we're involved in research in three of the biggest producers of illicit drugs in the world, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Colombia, and we're doing research in nine drug affected borderline regions, and which have become key hubs in the trafficking, the production and consumption of drugs. And it's partly because these borderlands are hubs but also we think these borderlands are central the question about how war economies become peace economies and we also feel that borderland communities perspectives the people who involved in this economies are basically missing from the debates around drugs development and peace building. So there are 12 different partners involved in this project so it's a very big project. And since March, we've more or less had to suspend or field work in the borderland sites. And so COVID itself presents a major challenge to research projects of this nature, as well as being a huge amount of rupture for the borderline communities that we're doing research with and working with. So in response to this we've formed a COVID research group within our project to better understand how to work in COVID and also how to work on COVID as a research issue. And I'm happy to talk about this more in the questions, but I do think it's important to note that for researchers. There's a set of really quite profound challenges, organizationally and logistically but also methodologically and ethically about how one does research in this environment. And it's a very important stress test for our project and in terms of how robust our partnerships are and also how we can continue doing research in this environment. So that's about working in COVID, working on COVID means kind of really how we reorienting our program to better understand what's happening in the sites that we're working in. And we have a number of emerging issues and hunches, which we will explore hopefully when we can get back into the field which we're hoping will be who knows but we're hoping towards sometime next year. So that's the rest of my talk is really going to be about some of these kinds of ideas and some of the feedbacks coming from our partners about how COVID is affecting borderland lives and livelihoods over the last few months. And it's important to kind of just foreground a few key, a few kind of quick comments about the nature of these borderland spaces where we're doing research first for linking to what Laura was saying earlier these are highly extroverted spaces they're transnational spaces they're places of hyper mobility people's livelihoods depend on movement that connected into regional and global circuits of trade of finance of commodities and ideas. So people's livelihoods are deeply embedded in connected to movements and whether it's labor migration and remittances or whether it's the control of movements of coca opium methamphetamines Jade pharmaceuticals pure and so on. There are also places of violence. A lot of different forms of violence that have been repeated cycles of armed conflict in these these spaces in wartime and in notion or post war transitions. And also we've seen the mutation of different forms of violence structural violence. paramilitary based violence the slow violence of drug use. And a fragmentation of the means of violence that places where the government footprints is limited or fit for an always contested and government services often limited particularly as we've seen a minute healthcare. Whereas whether the development indicators are much lower than many other parts of the country, high levels of spatial inequality. At the same time, process of accumulation in these borderland regions are linked to process investment and development in national and regional centers property markets depend upon illicit trade going on in these borderland spaces. So to finish off the very high risk environments and people are learning to deal with, I've learned over generations to deal with radical uncertainty. And illicit economies are central to that story about navigating uncertainty and risk. This economy is able people to navigate risk to escape reproduction squeezes to provide a safety net to access land and cronies and so on. I think it's all four of the four of these talks and shown that the COVID-19 really has accentuated marginality largely something is actively created. And what COVID does is intensify the intensify these processes of marginalization. And I'm going to give a few examples of that now. The final thing to say background about these border regions is they in the three countries have all become vectors or transmission zones for the spread of the pandemic. Each country's next to or approximate to major hubs of COVID so Iran, China and Brazil have been through the borderlands of Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar there's been a spread. Following the pathways and routes that connect these borderlands to metropolitan hubs. And there's a kind of a paradox in governmental responses to this this pandemic in that what you know something that's, you know, it's a transnational global phenomena but very nationalist and state centered responses emerge and as Laura has mentioned about the borders the attempt to manage and stem these unwanted flows. We've seen the closure of the China Myanmar Myanmar border for example the closure of the Afghan Iranian border, which affects formal trade effects informal trade effects remittances. These kinds of mechanisms actually push borderline communities into a closer relationship with illicit economies and I think, moving ahead. What we're going to see is illegal economies actually central to how people cope with and emerge from this pandemic. Another thing to say here is that the health economy trade off that we're talking about constantly in the industrialized West about the template of lockdowns of social distancing. And to protect the health care system is much less relevant and perhaps even impossible in the borderlands sites that we're looking at. In most cases there's a limited health care system to even protect. And the most urgent and life and death matters are usually around destitution economic livelihoods. So this health health economy trade off looks quite different from the perspective of the border regions that we're, we're studying. The other thing that comes out in least is an emerging from our field work is about the link the relationship between COVID and state fragility and violence. There's kind of initially when COVID the pandemic emerged there was some kind of optimistic narratives about it would reset the conflict that it would shift the balance of power, and there will be kind of the new opportunities opening up for peace processes and more stability we we haven't seen that at all. There has not been a transformative moment that shifted the dynamics of conflict we've actually seen the opposite that COVID seems to have created a more permissive environment for more militarized and more authoritarian measures and in particular, COVID is a shifted the constellation of political social forces and strengthen the position of the government in relation to drug eradication. There's been it's it's it's closed down the spaces for social protests a cochlearis coca farmers protesting against forms of eradication. It's ban on large meeting as crippled these forms of social protests, the lack of access of journalists to the borderlands and to such observers means it's less checks and balances on the government. It's created this permissive environment for the government to pursue a much more militarized and much harsher form of a drug eradication, which is pushing coca farmers who rely on on on listed economies into integrated destitution. I can talk more in the question answer if people want to ask about specific dynamics for example around Afghanistan and Myanmar and the peace process and conflict but it's a very similar story. How COVID has intensified pre existing conflict dynamics. An interesting set of questions that we, we would like to explore moving forward in terms of how COVID is changing state society relations. Certainly the feedback we're getting from our partners is that coven is has intensified and playing into a very common narrative amongst borderline communities of state abandonment. There are historical resentments, which lives on in border borderland memories about the lack of state services the only face of the state being the violence coercive face of the state. I think that the COVID measures have essentially the distribution effects have have laid kind of the costs of these effects have been much more and born by vulnerable communities in borderland areas. The lockdowns the border hardening these are things that are having very sharp shocks on people's livelihoods and ways of surviving. Another thing to think about is the longer term developmental costs of COVID and the international response and again it's too early to to predict this but there is certainly a danger and it's of how donors are now pivoting towards health and emergency responses with the consequent danger that that means the the longer term development of peace building measures of investment in these countries borderline spaces. The funding will will be rather than adding new funding will be redeployed and there will be opportunity cost in relation to transforming war economies into peace economies. There are kind of other questions and issues and if there are other questions and issues there's quite a lot of interesting things about how transnational organized crime and drug economies themselves are shifting in this new environment and there are other questions answers and that we can talk about it more but I guess one thing that comes out clearly is borderlands are areas of extreme innovation experimentation and we can see very quickly how illicit trade and illicit drug economies are adapting in very kind of nimble ways to this this new environment, perhaps more so than legal and illicit economies, but I'll leave it at that and thank you. Thank you very much Jonathan. This is an amazing panel I'm really really enjoying it I would ask you if I may please panellists will you now show yourselves again. All at once. And I would like some more questions in the question and answer session. Let's have a look. I've got a question. Let's let's sort these out to start with Kevin is asking Laura. How was the curfew imposed was the resistance what were the penalties of breaking the curfew and did the aid workers from overseas return home. When COVID appeared. Are you able to answer that for us. Laura. Thanks for the questions. And thank you for staying with us I don't know what time it is in Thailand but it's very late. So, yeah, I mean in terms of the curfews there have been different approaches. And I think when they were first imposed they were more staunchly kind of pleased and the most extreme example probably was in Kenya where there were actually police were actually beating people up who are found on the street breaking curfew. Which led to a kind of backlash if you know people being beaten up for not for not, you know, protecting, not in the name of not protecting their health that they're actually being subjected to physical abuse. And that has waned in time now you know the curfew has been lifted for the most part in most places. But it was, I mean what happened was basically that it proved to be impossible to entirely police because people have the need to get out, you know if you have a choice between the short term sort of survival needs of yourself and your family, the choices that even the medium term potential, not certain risk of content contracting a an illness which might or might not make you very ill, might actually pass you by without making you very ill. The choices are pretty clear for most people who are, you know, facing poverty, and they would do what they need to do in order to protect their, you know, to ensure that they're able to eat from one day to the next. So it just proved impossible to police really, which isn't to say that it won't come back that curfews won't return. Certainly there. Yeah, we have plenty of experience to show that curfews are a regular feature, not just in Kenya and Ethiopia as well and in other places. And so it's important to kind of look at, and for those of us who kind of follow them to to critique their use as a as a public health measure in this respect. In terms of the removal of humanitarian workers from not just from the Horn of Africa but from refugee settings and other kinds of humanitarian emergencies. Yes, it's happened everywhere. It has impacted, I would say it's impacted organizations that don't have really good decentralized networks most severely. So for years we've been banging on about the need to localize humanitarian aid, and that's not been done to any meaningful extent I think only 4% of international humanitarian funds are available, made available to local sources still. But, but some organizations are better able to work through their local partners on the ground and to support them adequately to be able to do that kind of work. And those organizations were most able to continue functioning and has less disruption. Unfortunately, because as I've said so localization has taken has been so slow to take root. It meant that many people, you know, left their countries and programs were suspended closed down or just put on hold and so there's been a really strong impact, not just on the ability to deal with COVID-19 but as well the ability to deliver other forms of humanitarian support. Thank you very much. I think we also have a question. Kevin's been very busy. A question for Aisha. Aisha Balkardi for two points. I'm on the loss of many regional accents within the UK, being 69 as a child living in London the yearly reunion in the 50s. And many of my father's comrades stayed with us, one from Coventry my father had to translate and others and I had to concentrate to understand even my mother's accent being from Yorkshire has softened in my lifetime please comment. You're muted, Aisha you're muted. Sorry. Yes, I will try to comment and I certainly can answer but I would like to sort of like make it clear that unfortunately I'm not an expert on the varieties of English in the UK, the regional varieties of English in the UK. As I specialize more on sort of Africa and North Africa but so what I think you are calling accents where actually probably in the 50s, you know what we would call now dialect. So, you know, even sort of like different dialects of English with their own phonological rules and their own lexicon, and that would explain why your father had to translate for you when people visited for, you know, from Coventry and why you had to concentrate. Now, of course these dialects are sort of disappearing in the UK and the different accents as well are fading there's a there's some kind of standardization or what we call leveling that is occurring in the UK and in other countries I guess where regional accents. You know, are changing and are getting more similar to the standard accent in the UK I think accents are becoming like more like the southern, you know, London accents and that's because you know the southern the London accent or the British standard accent is more prestigious. And people, you know, have more access to that accents through, you know, TV, radio, social media, etc. So, yeah, that's that's my answer. Thank you very much. We have a question also from Kevin again. I live in Thailand illicit drugs very easy to access this recent article illustrates Thailand and Myanmar destroyed 25 tons of illicit drugs collectively worth more than $2 billion on Friday, said the tide of drugs was growing as organized crime gangs boost supply and find new channels to do business. It's not really a question it's a comment but it would open up perhaps for you, Jonathan, as you suggested you might talk a little bit more about how very adept organized crime groups are at adapting to these crisis times would you like to unmute and address that for us. Yeah, thanks. I mean, I suppose the first thing to say is, we're interested in the, the way that drug economies are deeply embedded in the social life and the political life of these borderland regions and so we're, we're looking at this historically and rather than just one episodes of a drug seizure for example. Or even just the adaptation now in relation to covered. So I think there's a, we have to understand that that deep history and the, what we're finding our research on the Myanmar, China and Thailand border is a deep challenge to the kind of the narrative, the kind of mainstream policy narrative about if you bring peace, if you bring development, then you get rid of drugs, because one of the Myanmar shows actually it's the opposite. ceasefires in the early 1990s and the opening up of these regions to process of rapid development including Chinese capital, mining, pipelines, commercial agriculture has gone hand in hand with the big increase of drugs. And these are not only poppy and opium, but as you probably Kevin you know methamphetamine is huge now in these regions. So there's something interesting going on here which runs completely counter to the orthodoxy. And yes, there are there are seizures going on. But as we know that the seizures are only absolutely minuscule amount of the drugs that are flowing and the markets now are. Well the markets actually are in Myanmar itself so there's a major problem of drug use within in China and catching states for example, but also the markets going into China to Thailand to Singapore and to Australia. And so unless we think of this kind of issue in a more kind of holistic way in which centers and peripheries hubs and these marginal borderland regions are connected. Then, you know, for hardening borders seizure counter narcotics policies are actually not going to have their stated goals at all. Now, on the question about how organized crime is adapting in this kind of environment. The honest answer is, we don't have enough solid evidence about this at the moment. But what we do know is methamphetamine production is is increasing has not been affected by COVID. And so the precursor chemicals, the, the, the sites have not been affected. The people involved have found ways of moving the commodity. What we interested in your founder is that drug users within Myanmar, within Myanmar are finding it more difficult to get access to drugs. Because the kind of the brokers, the people are moving drugs to form the kind of the regional centers into the border regions. They're finding more difficult to move things because the lockdown, but for the bigger players, then they can, they can find ways of getting around this and certainly the flows seem to be going and continuing. So, I mean, we're finding there's forms of adaptation going on in Colombia, and also in Afghanistan. But this is something we need to do more work on and it's difficult to do research on this of course because it's very sensitive. So could I just follow up with a question, Jonathan, which is, you know, a million dollar question. This against the orthodoxy trend, which as you say is if you bring peace and prosperity to certain countries, then criminality of a very lethal kind actually may increase. Do you have a sense of what's happening here and how it could be altered and improved. So we're at this stage to have an answer to this question but we've got a bunches that we were exploring. I mean I think the, the very obvious big question is about what kind of development is happening in these spaces on whose terms, and what are the effects of those forms of development. So the kinds of developments that we have seen in the in the frontiers of Colombia or in the, the board lands of Myanmar are highly extractive and there's forms of accumulation by dispossession taking place. So land grabs extractive mining oil companies cattle ranching which are themselves very violent economies and are not benefiting the majority borderland populations. So it's not, it's more complicated in the saying development brings drugs, it's about certain types of development are associated with increased use. So, for example, in the jade mines have catching states. I mean people in our life history is talking to people in the borderlands and say drugs have come with the building of roads at the expansion of the mines. You know people get paid in drugs. It's a, it's a, you know, that so bringing forms of addiction leads to a more client labor force is central to the labor regimes and how they function. So what we're, what we're looking at in our project is how the terms of development and also the, the role of the state can shift, you know, the distribution of facts of development in these borderland spaces and deal with spatial inequalities are more inclusive forms of development. Otherwise, you know, this is purely forms of extraction that bring about all these forms of illicit economies and criminality itself. Thank you very much. Nora, I don't know if you want to add to that or not. I think I'm okay I think maybe we should. Yes, indeed there are yes so we're not really supposed to take anonymous questions but this is irresistible. Question for Aisha, which is an unusual question which you'd be willing to collaborate on the home school grammar project with others in Africa. A lot of schools remain closed in parts of sub Saharan Africa. And then I'm guessing this is the same person. I don't know. I'm Ugandan living in London was a different person difficult without your names wondering what Laura thought other will come back to that in a moment. Okay, so I'd show what about this invitation from anonymous person so you can't really respond unless they tell you who they are. Please unmute unmute. Sorry, I always do this. Yes, so the website is online and it's available to do anyone, you know, anywhere, you know, as long as they speak English, they can access it. I'm happy also, again, depending on who it is that is speaking to me but I'm very happy to collaborate and develop the website and make it accessible in, you know, to people in sub Saharan Africa and in different languages there. Absolutely happy. You can you can email me actually I think you'll find my email on the on the source website and I'm very happy to be emailed about it. So I shall while you're on this topic. There's the other question. English grammar understandable making English grammar understandable children who speak a language other than English could you talk a little more on exactly how this website has impacted the children from the marginalized communities in the UK please. I don't really know how the website has impacted children from marginalized linguistic communities yet because I don't I don't know who has used the the website and who has done the exercises the website is online and anyone can, you know, download the activities and and try these activities. What I do. What I hope and I really hope that this will show children who speak languages other than English or who speak, you know, varieties that are not standard English, I hope that they're going to, you know, respect their language and respect that the variety of English that they are speaking and and see that you know what they are speaking is a language with a grammar, despite what you know people tell them despite what you know they are they are made to believe. That's that's the impact that I hope to have a positive impact. Thank you very much. So, yes, Laura, you're quite right. The question for you I'm Uganda living in London I was wondering what Laura thought about the open door refugee policy in Uganda, and how that coupled with the announcements by WFP in April May 2020, but it did not have sufficient resources to support these refugees in the face of National Lockdown may have affected the outcomes for them during the ongoing pandemic. Yeah, thank you. It's a good question for those who may not be so familiar with the situation in Uganda. There are. Uganda's hosting something like 1.4 million refugees at the moment, most of them from South Sudan but also from the Democratic Republic of Congo from Somalia from Eritrea other countries. And while there are refugee settlements in the country, there is what what this, the questioner has called an open door policy which is to say that people can come and go between the settlement to the camp and wherever they want to go they can go to settlements they can go to cities and very what we find is that many refugee households split themselves up and so some people are living and working in the cities, and sending money back to help support their relatives and some who are receiving rations are also even sharing some of those rations with their relatives outside the settlement. So, there have been prior to Kobe there have been a lot of analyses of this policy to look at whether what are the pros and cons of it. And in fact it turns out there are quite a lot of pros to it, not so many cons that the more mobility that refugees have, the more able they are to support themselves and to to to protect themselves against disruptions in the pipeline of assistance that may be provided to them so if there's inadequate support from the world food program and UNHCR, if they're able to move that that has less of an impact on them than if they're not. And that's something that in the work that I do in the region we've held Uganda up as an example, it's not a perfect example by any means there are lots of problems with the ways that it's carried out which are go beyond the purposes of this tonight's discussion. So it's not perfect but it is really a quite an improvement over some of the refugee hosting policies that we see in countries in the region. And so, and Uganda is quite proud of it and they are quite actively kind of trying to export it as a form of good practice. So when the lockdowns and the restrictions on movement were put in place and they also affected the refugee populations in Uganda, there was it directly affected people's ability to support themselves and to kind of mitigate against these disruptions in the aid pipeline that I just mentioned. And it really just underscores why mobility is absolutely so important. The more you put in peril the support that people can rely on from external actors, the more mobility becomes really centrally important. And so, so it's not a new argument really that's come out it's just really highlighting what many of us have been saying for a very long time that the answer to donor fatigue and to the dwindling availability of international aid is to relax restrictions on mobility and allow people to help themselves which is what they're always already doing and I always tell students on the first day of a class on forced migration. You must keep in mind from the very start that people are not sitting around waiting for international aid to help them. They're automatically immediately trying to help themselves as soon as crisis strikes and what aid should be doing if it's doing it well should be doing those activities rather than undermining them. So here we have a clear example of restriction on mobility and and reduction in the amount of aid that really undermines people's ability to help themselves. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Vanja hi good evening we have a lovely question here for Sreya. Sreya would you be so kind to tell us some more about sex workers children's plights during the current pandemic. Yes, sure. Thank you so much for that question, Vanja. So in terms of children of sex workers. One of the issues that I think have sort of come up in news reports but I think requires a lot more explanation is how they are sort of surviving. So first they are living with their mothers, how they're surviving, of course, and that would also then lead to questions around, again, issues that woman sex workers as mothers are facing and how they're sort of handling problems that are more domestic and family related and related to raising children, as well as these kind of work related issues, and more broader kind of financial and mobility oriented problems that they're going through. So there are a lot of in the recent, I would say years. A lot of shelter homes have been developed across India for children of sex workers, primarily to allow them to kind of flourish, you know, in their own kind of ways and develop new skills and get a better education and sort of like allow them to see what other opportunities are for them to explore, rather than, you know, go into sex work if that is the only or limited option that they have available. Now, in these shelter homes, I mean, again, there's not a lot of information as to, you know, to what extent have they been consistently effective, especially during this pandemic. In terms of the kind of financial support that they receive to help these children, what kind of limitations or blockages have they experienced when it comes to that. Or are they taking in new children if mothers feel helpless and they want to sort of get support from these shelters, are they able to send their children during this pandemic. And also, just how our children kind of dealing with, again, this issue that I have sort of emphasized and I hope to explore more is this, you know, problem of just sort of relocating or uprooting from what they believe to be home, whether that's a, you know, the brothel space or whether that's those are other types of, you know, homes or shelters or houses, whatever that may be. If they have to move around if they have to find new places or if mothers have to kind of move from brothels to go back to their home states which again a lot of people, a lot of women are having to do. And if they're doing that with children who do not really know where their mothers really come from because they have, you know, grown up in this urban kind of city space. What is that move like. I think a lot of us have heard, you know, news and stories about just general like migrant workers walking from state to state trying to get back home in India and a lot of them were sort of just just walking for days and weeks because there was no possibility of transportation. So I think just around this question of you know children's plights and challenges during this pandemic. I think it does require a lot more attention than I feel it has been getting. I hope that, you know, perhaps through research or whatever their form, we're able to bring that to people's attention because they are one of the very, you know, vulnerable groups of people and they're dependent on their mothers but when you have something like this happening like the pandemic and with very limited sort of options to how people can survive are available. When mothers are, they want to be reliant on the government but they can't, but they cannot and they have to find other ways to to survive or to cope and heal from this. You know how do they then become that sort of pillar of support for their own children. Right, so, yeah, I wish I had more to that question but that's all I can say. Yeah, you paint a very poignant picture it's it's it's extraordinary what these children and their moms have to have to deal with I wonder if I could ask we've got about 15 minutes left because we've been asked to finish a little bit early so the next panel can be warmed up. I wonder if I could ask each panelist to consider a response to one of the issues that particularly Laura and Jonathan have touched upon repeatedly, which is that this is a transnational worldwide event this pandemic, but it is being responded to in every country that I know about in a national and often nationalistic way, which presumably is futile in the short and the medium and the long term because of course the virus knows no boundaries and will move as it sees fit. And I wondered if I mean this is a million dollar question I'm sorry to put pressure on you guys but I wanted to feature be starting with Laura might like to hazard a suggestion about what could happen and please inform us also if you see some some good practice coming out of the current situation. Thanks Laura. I think it was the UN Secretary, UN Secretary General Guterres who who said few months ago, you know the only way that we will be this pandemic is to treat it as a global issue. And if you think that what's happening in the so called global doesn't affect you or that you don't have time to pay attention to it because you're worried about what's happening with COVID-19 in your own country, then you're misunderstanding the nature of this, this kind of global health threat. And I think he was thinking more in terms of public health terms but I, but it's also equally valid when you think about the, the economic aspects, the ways in which this this pandemic plays out. You see that, you know, even when prevalence rates case rates go down that the economic impacts of this pandemic play out continue to play out in this particular society. So, for me that's really true and I've kind of reflected back on on those comments repeatedly in the last several you know last few months. And that, you know, even if, let's say, you know, a vaccine is found in the next, however many months not in the next three months I don't think but probably in the next hopefully in the next six to nine months. Will that mean an end to this crisis no I don't think so I think the ways in which the economics of this has have played out the kinds of challenges that have it has posed to people particularly people that that we've been talking about tonight who who are in sort of societal spaces are going to be felt for a really long time. And so, as researchers for us to think then about, how does that change the way that we all work the, you know, the logistics of how we work. It's just like the aid workers that someone asked about you know how has it meant the massive evacuation yes it has but it's also meant the massive evacuation of international researchers. It might mean that we work in very different ways with our internet with our national collaborators, but it also means that. Yeah that we that it alters our questions it alters our questions about for instance Jonathan and I work on borders. The questions we're asking about borders are fundamentally in some cases in some ways changed because of what's been happening, and that is not going to go away just because we've now got a vaccine. I would invite everyone to think about whatever your own individual research kind of fascination is to to ask yourselves, in what ways does this current situation that we're going through changed in really key ways some of the questions that you might be asking. Yeah, thank you. Thank you that's very thought provoking Sarah would you like to try this very difficult question next. Yeah, sure I think, I think personally just from. I guess just, you know, attending these webinars and conferences and talks what I've noticed is. And I'm very happy when I noticed this is this sort of focus on on gender, I think has been quite incredible, especially like I'm, I'm bait I'm I live in in Toronto, so in Canada and I think a lot of the sort of webinars that I've been attending have been focused on kind of the local situation here. But even when I think about, you know, places in the global south, I think there's been a lot of focus on kind of revisiting this question of gender or the impact on that this pandemic in various dimensions of, of gender and sort of sexuality and as well as race, but I know that, you know, in terms of like race and class, we have a lot of sort of material and sort of practical awareness around issues when it comes to racing I think often gender, it kind of happens and very sort of insidious ways, the issues, whether it's in our homes or in social spaces and often we don't really know how to talk about them or address them because, you know, we're a lot of us are conditioned to think that this is normal. But, but it's been great how you know whether it's their organizations or just individuals are becoming more aware of this that, you know, this may have been normal but to what extent is this normal becoming unpleasant or challenging in this time of the pandemic, when it's very much in our faces and very, you know, confrontational in our everyday lives, right. I think, I think when I'm thinking about my own research interests and kind of the issues of sex workers, there's been a lot of, I think, efforts and, you know, successful attempts of collaborating across borders and across sort of transnational spaces to bring in perspectives or support from other organizations or other kind of, you know, researchers or, you know, whatever that may be to kind of just work together and as Laura was saying to really understand and to just kind of understand the situation as a global pandemic as it is, but more in kind of active ways of thinking about it as a very transnational and global issue and how we can address this and move forward from this. But again, that's there's also a lot of uncertainties when it comes to thinking about how do we move forward and, you know, what the future holds and all those things but I think I'm glad that a lot of people are actually starting to think that way and, and yeah a lot of I think positivity is coming from that I think it's personally can be very therapeutic so I enjoy when I hear these things, you know about the future. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It's good to have a positive note as well. Thank you very much. Would you like to unmute and give us your solution or your view on this? Yes. I think my what I have to say is a little bit less positive than than Shreya I'm sorry for for breaking the positive cycle. Um, what we see from a language perspective is, I mean, there is some positive in some countries but there is also some worrying trends that we're seeing from the linguistic perspective as I was talking, you know, towards the I was saying towards the beginning of my talk, we are really seeing an acceleration, you know, of the death of some languages and, and, and we don't really I mean, you know, the death of a language is the disappearance of a language or languages is some is a trend that we really cannot change. You know, already, but when it, it goes faster because of a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, then there is really nothing that we can do. Unfortunately, you know, once the last speakers of a language to come to COVID-19, then that's it. The language is dead. And, and that's it. And we are not in a position, researchers linguists are not in a position, you know, to go to the field and, and, and recall those last words from from the last speakers. So, so this is, this is really worrying and, and, and not really positive. Now I want to say something positive as well I don't want to end on something negative the positive. I think is that in certain countries and particularly in countries as I was saying in Algeria in countries that really for such a long time did not care about the minority languages. They did not want to acknowledge to officialize these languages to, you know, teach them at school to include them in education in culture in in politics. They are now forced to include them in the picture they are now forced to translate information in these languages because well because they have no other choice if they want to, you know, avoid. You know, the worsening of the crisis if they want, you know, to prevent the bigger death toll then they have to take into account these languages and translate them and this is what they are what some countries are doing Algeria is doing this. And, yes, and then this is good. Thank you very much for this. I understand your position positive and negative. Jonathan, over to you. Thanks. Nice question to finish with isn't it. I mean from from the perspective of the research that we're doing what I mean comes out for us is the, and certainly Laura's work speaks to this issues and the centrality of the margins that these. You know, whether we're talking about pandemics whether we're talking about fragile states whether we're talking about illicit drugs, we can't just see these as things that are out there that can somehow be contained and dealt with in these these kind of unruly places. They're very much linked to what's happening here. And I guess what we're trying to do in our project is build up a kind of a more relational approach which sees how what's happening in the boardlands shifts and change what happens in the center and vice versa and to think about those relationships more seriously. So, COVID is a great illustration of this and hopefully open up new kind of avenues for scholarship, which kind of, I guess leads to a different understanding of the cartography of power and sets of interests and policies in relation to this. Again, there are some kind of practical things that we're working on with about the implications of this perspective so how to go beyond methodological nationalism. And if you look at the aid world in particular how it's set up. You have country teams country budgets country monitoring valuation systems. And statistics is generated at the country level. So how do we go beyond that kind of way of seeing the world in thinking about it more regionally and looking at from the perspective of those in the borderlands who are often straddling several countries, moving around and don't feel particular loyalty to anyone, one country. So I think there's some really kind of difficult but interesting questions about how donors and international actors organize themselves and how they might organize themselves differently. And in the expertise there generally I mean so I see as a great example of this how how do you, in aid work, you go, you get promoted by going from one country to another and getting new different experiences. And you don't get promoted for knowing a region well, knowing the language and, you know, and so you know there are some kind of questions about the incentives within institutions and whether they reward this kind of understanding that goes, goes beyond the status view of the world. I mean, I guess, if we want to finish off on some optimistic notes and I'm grasping it. Yeah. You could argue that this crisis has shown the importance of science and social science in particular and the contributions it can make to public policy. I do that this crisis has opened up an understanding of how important states actually are in spite of the problems of status view of the world. Having a strong states that can respond to these issues is, you know, kind of awakening and also showing how global governance is actually really very important to tackle these kind of questions around inequality and social justice political justice. So you could argue there's, there's some spaces opening up. And but obviously there's some very strong counterforces to that as well. Yeah. Thank you very much. We need to bring it to the close I hope that this panel which I think has been absolutely brilliant has demonstrated very clearly the centrality of sauce and the research undertaken at sauce because without people like these four great scholars to interpret for us and explain what they already know about before COVID over took us without that deep knowledge it would not be possible to understand what is happening to these regions and indeed to the world as a whole. So I'm very, very grateful to you it's tremendous work you're doing it's been a fantastic panel. I just want to say a few quick very quick thank yous. Thank you first to Dr Vanja Hamzic, who had this idea in the first place, and invited me to run with it and set it up. Very brilliant idea. Thank you, Vanja. I want to thank Stephanie Guiron and Kumi. Thank you so much for making this all technologically fabulously smooth. Most of all really to Dr Amani Yakin, who set up the festival ideas and who made this all possible. It's a tremendous labor of love and it's worked brilliantly. And I've enjoyed every moment of what I've participated in. So to conclude, thank you so much because I think we should give you all give you a little metaphorical flap. And I'm so grateful that you were prepared to give up your time from all over the world to be with us this evening. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.