 So I would like to start on this first panel of the Sewas Festival of Ideas, a week long series of events that will be exploring various themes and research areas at Sewas and particularly focused on the theme of decolonising. So welcome to all those who have joined. The way this event is being run, we are recording it. We have a wonderful list of presenters who will each be talking about their research themes. We have Dr Maya Goodfellow, Sarah Walker, Pavian Pung, Professor Laura Hammond and Dr Kalyango Seba from Kampala, Uganda joining us as well. And all of these speakers will present their current research on refugees and migrants in the context of decolonising knowledge, as this is extremely important, especially because in the first 20 years of the 21st century, we have seen more people displaced at any point in history. It's particularly interesting that in this panel we'll be looking at the Horn of Africa, where currently over 14 million people have been displaced in some way or another. And I will have 8 to 10 minutes. And after that, we'll open the panel with some reflections and questions, and we will also be sharing your questions and answer questions. So please direct these at the Q&A tab at the bottom of your Zoom window, so it's the bottom right. And I will be sharing those with the panelists who will do, who will obviously address these. And we expect the event will be lasting around one hour and a half. So I think you're all ready to hear this wonderful lineup of speakers. And so I'll first introduce Dr Maya. Good fellow researcher, writer, journalist. I'm the author of Hostile Environment, How Immigrants Became Skategoats, which has just recently been republished as a paperback for Verso books. If you haven't read it, please do. And she is currently a Liverpool Early Career Researcher at Sperry Sheffield University where she works on issues related to race capitalism and abolition. So I'm going to pass over to Maya. Thank you so much for having me and thank you to Stephanie and others who have been integral to putting together this whole series of events. It's such pleasure to be here with a really great lineup of speakers. And I am going to, I guess it's somewhat narrowly, but specifically focus on the popular debate in the UK around, around immigration broadly and I'm going to try and specifically think about the role that race plays which is a large part of what my work is about. I'm going to try and do this by thinking about one of the main arguments that's made against immigration in popular discourse in the UK. And then I'm going to try because we're living through these particularly terrible times I'm going to try and specifically think about what this debate but also what immigration enforcement in the UK means during a pandemic. So how are people being impacted, which is some of the work that I've been most recently been doing. And I suppose the sort of starting things underlying everything that I'm going to say is really whether we're thinking about political debate, media debate or actually in certain parts of scholarship, particularly thinking about political science and mainstream migration literature. So often what we find is racialized conceptions of migration being reproduced. And that is thinking about the people who move are treated as sort of things to be studied populations to be studies as opposed to people human being that seems like a basic thing to say but I think it is worth stating that so much of the political debate at least is structured as migration being a problem to be dealt with to be controlled to be minimized. And so the human, the humanity of all of this, this whole discussion is often sidelined or treated as something that is relatively important. And I'm going to, I suppose, and adopt or contribute to what is a more critical vein of literature, in particular which brings in thinking about the UK's immigration system which brings race into analysis but also brings the UK's history of empire into analysis. And so today, a lot of the work that I've been doing is really drawing on and building on the work done by so many other people which looks at the existing realities of the immigration systems and what does it mean to try and navigate the UK's sort of in conjunction with that, while the arguments made to justify some of these incredibly restrictive measures that we see. So what we know is that if you look back at the UK's history of immigration legislation which I'm not going to have time to do but what you find is you find history of racism. So really from the 60s and 70s onwards you find pieces of immigration legislation being cast through parliament, which are specifically focused on making it more difficult for people of color coming from the colonies and former colonies to come to the UK. So Gaminda Bamber, who is based at Sussex, calls these policies not immigration policies but policies of racialization, demarcating certain groups of people as less desirable, as people who need to be kept out or as people who should only be able to stay within the country for a specific amount of time. And if you fast forward to now, obviously a lot happens between from the 60s to now, but what you find is some of these racialized logic still in operation in the sets of policies that make up the hostile environment. And so we know from reams and reams of evidence that these are racially discriminatory policies and these have racialized outcomes in terms of how people are being impacted. And I will mention that in the end in terms of what the hostile environment, the ongoing hostile environment means for people during the pandemic. But really thinking about the arguments that are used to justify these pieces of legislation and sort of justify these restrictive measures. And I also understand them as we can conceptualize them in these two sort of broad overlapping categories, one being economic and the other being cultural. So the economic arguments, I'm not going to go into this idea that migration is by the UK economy that people who migrate here or wants coming to take from the benefit system and also taking jobs from people who are already in the country. I mean, I don't buy any of those arguments, but I think they're sort of well, they've been, we're quite familiar with them and none of them are factually accurate. But I think that's, maybe we can talk about that in the Q&A because I think the second set of arguments which overlap with those the cultural, the so-called cultural arguments are ones that are much less talked about much less dissected and understood at least in mainstream schools, they just tend to be repeated. And so this is the argument that immigration is bad for British or English culture, and that is one of the reasons why it needs to be restricted. And so in particular, we see this argument being made in from the 60s and 70s onwards, and they, these arguments do find their roots in empire, but we find them being articulated more and more from the 60s and 70s by this sort of loose group of people who are called the new right and Enoch Powell was one person who saw within this sphere of this group. And what this group do is in the 60s and 70s they reject scientific racism, they say we do not think this is a group of white people, they say we do not think we are racially superior to people of color coming from the colonies and former colonies, but we are just culturally distinct. And if we have too many immigrants of a certain kind coming from certain parts of the world, then they will dilute English culture, they dilute the bonds of solidarity that are necessary for things like the NHS. And that is why these groups of people need to be restricted from coming to the UK. And the reason why I think it's important to sort of hold in on this is these these arguments that we still see made now in the sort of being refashioned in particular ways that people talk about the pace of change being too fast. They say they don't recognize the area around them and or even during the height of the so-called refugee crisis in summer of 2015, what you heard often was one of the arguments that was often made and still made is that people coming from certain parts of the world have to direct to European values and this is an incredibly Islamophobic argument and because it is direct often directed to people who are seen to be Muslims. And I don't have loads of time so I can't go into all of the ways that this argument manifests because it comes up in all kinds of different in different forms but I think there's two things that we want to think about here in terms of thinking about the race and empire sort of featuring in this is one is we want to ask what culture is so how is culture even being defined in this formulation and it's worth thinking about a really good Stuart Hall quote which I'm now going to butcher which is Paul writing about the drink tea and he says what does anyone know about English person except they can't get through the day without tea except there are no tea plantations in England where is tea grown in India Selan Sri Lanka that is the outside is inside the history of the English and when so when we're thinking about this idea of English or British culture, it's treated as if it is bounded and static thing that sorts endogenously produced within the UK but actually what we know is that this is something that isn't static there's constantly shifting but also that the if you buy there to be some kind of UK culture which I think is quite difficult to argue if you think about different people will imagine this in different ways then it's quite difficult to suggest that it's sort of something that has only ever been produced within this founded entity of the UK. But the other point I think this is worth noting here in relation to this argument about culture is that this culture in a lot of ways is a proxy for race so scholars at the time dubbed this the new racism. It's worth noting that not all groups are seen as culturally incompatible with the UK. So one way of thinking about this is that when people talk about so called illegal immigration as being a threat to the UK. They most likely are not thinking about, say white Australians who have overstayed their, their visa, right this is a racialized concept. And this is really important for understanding the way that the debate manifests in the UK because often it's argued that anti immigration feeling is a natural reaction to too much immigration of a certain kinds of people naturally feel culture, threatened and their culture is being threatened. If we begin to think about how these things are constructed how they are racialized and much like race, how this idea of culture is being constructed is being fabricated. And I think it becomes much easier to unpick and make sense of these anti immigration feeling this anti immigration feeling which is often used to justify incredibly restrictive policy. But the one thing that I wanted to end on is really is where we are now and so I'll just very quickly say that as well as being racialized, evidently, the immigration system and the immigration discourses in the UK are classed there is a class element to this and we know that they are purely by looking at the immigration rules as they stand at the moment, you have to earn a certain amount of money in order to be able to come to the UK, and you have to be able to afford to navigate this incredibly costly system. And it's worth thinking about how during the pandemic during the height of the lockdown in the UK, one of the arguments that's been made is that there's been a sort of recognition that so called key workers people who were dismissed as low skilled are actually incredibly vulnerable and that many of these people on migrants migrated to the UK from other countries. And this argument was really used to push back against the immigration health surcharge, which is a policy that means that people according to their immigration status have to pay twice over the NHS they paying through the taxes national insurance, like people who happen to be born in the UK but then they also have this extra charge. And just just because of where they were born. And there was a pushback against this during the lockdown related to this key work narrative saying actually a lot of these people are really really essential to the functioning of the UK society doing incredibly important jobs that have often been seen as unimportant. And so what happened is the government suspended the NHS, they scrapped the NHS health surcharge, but only for NHS and social care workers. All other key workers still have to pay who are who are who have this condition attached to their, their visa, they have to pay the surcharge as everyone else because of the immigration status applies to you still have to pay. And so I think this really shows the problem with the contribution narrative is so often underlying a lot of our debate, this idea that certain people can come to the UK if they contribute in the right way. What it does is it reinforces this really commoditized idea of who might as who doesn't who should be given rights and who doesn't. And so I suppose I'll end by saying, I think this really shows what's happened during the pandemic and this really racialized history of who is subjected to immigration enforcement who is seen as a threat and who is not what this means for how people experience the immigration system and the, the bordering system is not only at the borders in terms of going through airports but is in our public services. It really shows us that we I think we need to sort of flip the narrative and stop focusing so much on the figure of the migrant and actually focus much more attention as many do. But much more attention on popular debate to on the damages done by borders, as opposed to thinking that borders are these things that keep us safe and realizing that they're things that produce violence produce precarity and actually doing incredible amount of harm to a huge number of people. And so, yeah, I suppose I'll just end with that thinking that part of this is really about re centering what we're looking at and not only continuing to sort of reproduce these very racialized ideas of immigration but beginning to focus more attention on the border. Thank you very much Maya. Great timing, and I think a very good point to sort of conclude on. So welcome to all those who've joined us while Maya speaking my name is a layer 40 teaching fellow so as I will be sharing this panel. Can I ask you all to direct your questions to the Q&A tab at the bottom so if you have any questions for Maya about the history brief history she gave us of how migration has been racialized and the racialization of the immigration system and the role that she plays in, in the defense of borders then please start typing away I will direct these at the panelists at the end of the session. So our next speaker is Sarah Walker she has she's a researcher and practitioner in the refugee sector in London. Her PhD in sociology explores the productive nature of border so it's a nice continuation from where we left off. And she examines in particular the interaction between migration right regimes and young African men who are bureaucratically labeled as an accompanied minors specifically in Italy. She's also a research fellow on a project that examines the nexus between climate change and migration at the University of Bologna, which is very topical so I'll pass over to Sarah Walker who will it introduce her research to all of you. Thank you very much and thank you for that introduction and yeah so this research that I'm going to present now is based on my PhD which I just recently finished so I've tried to summarize it so I hope it's going to work and also focus predominantly on the underlying aspects of what this project has relates to this panel but I think it follows on nicely from what what Maya was saying because I look specifically about the productivity of borders and in particular looking at unaccompanied minors in Italy and how these young men I focus only on men or African migrants and yet I look at how the border policies create harm to them so I'm going to share the screen and hopefully this will work. So it looks at young African migrants I've called them migrants using the terminology as a neutral term not encompassing any kind of false binary between voluntary enforced turning 18 in Italy or the border work of childhood and race in the European migration regime. And I want to just start with this drawing which was done by one of my participants Amadou who was 18 at the time he's from the Gambia and came to Italy as a 16 year old as an unaccompanied minor to seek asylum. Because this drawing encompasses many elements of my research not least the visual elements and the perspectives and counter narratives of the young men I spoke to so he described this picture he shared it with me. As the perfect picture is the perfect picture of illegal immigrants and he laughs at this term as they use us in everything we carry the boat with the machines and everything fixed so heavy so difficult you have to drag it to the sea. And this is a picture of him and other young men carrying a boat from Libya to cross the sea to Italy. And this picture reveals his experiences in the politics of abandonment of European migration policies and the importance of the sea as I'll go on to discuss. This drawing also does more than capture the helpless victims on boats which are so often portrayed in the media usually an image taken from above, showing pat bodies and overcrowded small vessels bobbing helplessly in the sea. His drawing is from the other side it reverses this image and shows the agency and complicity of those about to embark on the journey, as well as the way in which they used at every stage. The boat, the small boat held over their heads is at once a talisman of hope and a weight and a burden. And this provides a different sense of the constitutive relationship between the border regime and its outsiders, as foregrounded by the sea as I'll explain shortly. So my research problematises the crisis narrative, as many others have done of the migration crisis so called in Europe through historicising migration and revealing how this narrative masks policies of deterrence and harm as Maya has alluded to, which negatively impacts in this case unaccompanied minors in Italy particularly as they grow up and become adults so I want to compare with them. This next picture which I found on Pinterest, which refers to Italian settlers as opposed to migrants in Libya. So Libya was once an Italian colony from 1910 to 1947. And here from Ian Chambers asks us to attend to the accumulation of memories of migration that make up the Mediterranean and reminds us that in Libya in the 1930s some 13% of the population was made up of Italians. Today the Mediterranean is traversed in the opposite direction by those coming from Africa and Asia, looking for a better life. So through focusing on these historical linkages between the two countries, we can see how this influences the construct of the other and the way in which problems caused to the young men in my study derived from the structural inequalities and raced landscape of the geopolitical terrain in which European interests and histories still shape the lives of post colonial subjects today. This shows the position of Italians as migrants and subalterns. So more recent scholarship has shown how the militarization of EU borders further empowered militias involved in fueled weapon and human smuggling in Libya, boosting a brutal system of detention and forced labor that both traps migrants in Libya and pushes them towards Europe, as Pranel and Chile said this ongoing racial climate crosses boundaries from the global south to the north as colonialism. And so instead if we do as Helen Petzani suggest and view the world from the sea we can see how unruly freedom of human mobility far from being an anomaly has been a constant throughout history and persist in spite of the multifarious practices that try to tame it. In fact, as legal channels into Europe are ever more restricted, making the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean Sea, increasingly becoming the only alternative for those seeking a better life. Indeed, following the creation of the European Union, the legal movement of people between North Africa and Europe with seasonal labor status was curtailed, yet despite the risk of death, people still come. And there is a lot of evidence that border controls are simply rerouting people to more dangerous channels. So then I want to show this other drawing that I'm already shared with me in which he represents himself as a wrestler. And he says I don't feel like an immigrant. I feel like someone who's living his life who has the right to see the world. And let's say the rest are just respents dignity and power and respect. So again, this is a focus on rights and the right to see the world and how these rights are detracted from the young man in my study through border controls. So building on the critique of the crisis narrative and focusing on counter narratives such as that of Amadou, I utilize the framework in my research of the black Mediterranean, which is a term coined by Alessandro de Mayo. So using this framework brings to light the colonial connections between past and present and it visualizes histories and connections between Italy and Europe and Africa and histories that are ignored in the politics of abandonment and crisis narratives. And it visualizes that just as the expulsion and enslavement that characterized the black Atlantic were crucial to modern capitalism as Paul Gilroy has shown. So present day migration is related to European geopolitical interests. It focuses further on the sea as a site of human rights violation and the obscuring of violence. So the research that I focus on is framed within the black Mediterranean notion, and I focus particularly on young men such as Amadou arriving and being labeled unaccompanied minors, and how their transition to adulthood encompasses the intersection of childhood and race. So I conducted an ethnography of a reception center in northern Italy and focused in on 12 young African migrants or male. And I consider the interaction between migration regimes and unaccompanied minors to explore the productive nature of borders. So it looks at the lived experience of the transition to adulthood and the intersection of the border of childhood and race. I'm going to the legal elements because I don't have time it's very complicated but essentially you may well know a lot of child migrants are received temporalized hospitality until the age of 18 on the basis of their child status, after which most EU member states return them as adults or they lose all their rights to accommodation and protection. Italy however at least in theory is different, but I'm not going to go into detail here. So the research contends that unaccompanied minors is a construct deriving from the intersection of the sedentary perspective of Europe's migration policies and the idealized Western construct of the cult of childhood. So age then emerges as a biographical border, as Nick Meyer has identified the division between protection and deportation. So my research looks at what happens after the unaccompanied mine who's actually managed to survive the perilous journey across land and sea and made it to Europe turns 18 and is legally considered adult. And what happens after they cross the protective threshold of childhood. So that's my findings really briefly. Again, I really important as my attention to racialization of the migrant and using this transition as a lens can show how the transformation from the vulnerable deserving child to the folk deserve devil and deserving adult. It also illuminates the false morality of the temporalized hospitality for the child and in doing so foregrounds race in the migration discourse. It shows how racialized discourses and the normative construction of good childhood intersect in the construction of the unaccompanied minor. And it also shows the complexities of these young men as they negotiate and contest the venerable subject to the minor wrestling with the regime to keep hold of hope for their better future. And it further identifies the harm done to these young men via the migration regime rather than vice versa, and it reveals the fallacy then of this protective states of Europe in the ongoing processes of subordination and exclusion faced by the young men in my study, particularly as they transition to adulthood. Thank you. Thank you Sarah very much and someone has asked if they could possibly have access to these slides. Although I would like to sort of remind everybody the event is being recorded so you can probably rewatch take screenshots of these but we'll discuss this afterwards with the panelists. So, if you have any other questions particularly on the discussions topics that are being introduced, as in Sarah's case you know, getting us to think about vulnerability particularly immigration systems. So thank you very much for your actual questions to the Q&A tab. And we will be now moving to Favin Fung, who is a Cambodian doctoral researcher in visual sociology, and also an artist. She has exhibited her artworks in Cambodia. She's mostly used acrylics as a medium to unpack the topic of gender inequality in Cambodia, but at the moment she is researching for her PhD, which actually uses mixed methods to understand the experience of marriage migrants and what they're going through in the visa application process in the UK. So I'll pass over to Favin. Thank you. I'm going to try to share screen. Hopefully it works or not. Sorry, this one. There you go. Okay. Okay. Thank you. So my name is Favin and I'm an PhD candidate at the University of London, and I'm researching marriage migration. So today I kind of want to explore the question of what makes someone a migrant, particularly what makes someone a marriage migrant. So marriage migration is a bureaucratic term of migration on the basis of marriage or civil partnership. So marriage migration is a topic not often talked about. However, there's currently an increasing volume of literature and research on this topic. So marriage migration is often the discussion on marriage migration kind of centre on its rules and requirements. So for example, the minimum income requirements of 18,600 pound a year that the British partner needs to have and also the sponsored and known EU partner to come to the UK. So there have been a lot written on the requirements. But today I kind of want to shift our focus slightly to the question of what makes a marriage migrant, particularly on the social technical arrangements that comes to enact a marriage reform. To do that, I propose that we pay close attention to a particular object, a bureaucratic object, which is a form. So let's just first look at what is the Spousal Visa application form. So it's a form, as an official form, and it is for a non-EU partner. It is created in order to gain entrance into a particular country, in this case the UK, to live with their British partner, or to remain in the country as a partner of a British citizen. So it is an official document and it exists online. It used to be like a physical form, where you download and you fill it. But now, in order to fill this form, you have to go online to do that. So the study of visa application form hardly occupies centre stage in immigration control analysis, despite the fact that we encounter bureaucratic form everywhere. So it's almost impossible to go on your daily life without filling any form. It doesn't matter if you're a marriage migrant or a migrant, you always have to fill a form. You have to fill a form, your visa form in order to obtain your visa to come into the UK. So it's unavoidable to face to have to encounter this bureaucratic form. So the studying of application forms as materialisations of border technology is part of an attempt to kind of move from border spectacle that fixates on a kind of ritualised display of violently expulsion to administrative bordering that is no less violent. An application form as part of administrative bordering is where policy and law and ideology and mobility management is materialised. And it can also be argued that people experience policy through forms and paperwork and interaction with street level bureaucrats. So administrative bordering allow us to kind of examine law in action. So when we look at the visa application form, I take that as a device, but this device doesn't kind of just exist in isolation. It utilises a cascade of other actors and devices. So for example, this form work with a biometric machine professionals such as solicitors, immigrant officials and with IT systems. So it works together as a network. In this case, I adopt Rupert's definition of device as involving kind of specific arrangements of humans and technologies, but rather than simply representing the migrant devices such as forms also enact subjects. So to collect, store or retrieve, analyse and present data through various methods means to bring those objects and subjects that data speak of into being. So to bring that to the form, in order to fill the form, we need to translate the messiness of our intimate life to fit the template of the form. So the form is not a neutral piece of paper, simply asking question. The form is regulated and governed by other policies, and by the government attitudes and values on migrants. So for this particular form, it is governed by the British value on what a proper legitimate family should be. So these are some of the questions on the form. The form is very long, but I extracted some of the questions on it to put it here. So for example, as you can see, there's a number of ideas and belief about romance and relationship that are folded onto this form. So the questions about whether the couple is monogamous or if the marriage is arranged, or if the applicant is related to their partner. So as you can see the questions are written to target a particular audience such as South Asians. The romance also needs to be translated into a certain concrete form. So for example, providing applicants have to provide marriage certificates, wedding photographs, and romance also need to be translated into a certain narrative that could be understood by the British culture. So for example, romance, often time to be based on individual choice and true love and shouldn't be arranged. So for same sex couple who are engaging in this visa process, they will be asked to present their relationship akin to marriage, meaning the union still needs to be molded into the married couple model. So although the basis of this migration is on a particular type of marriage or relationship, money and income take make up most big part of it. So, for example, it is very common because the UK political rhetoric is kind of occupied with the image of a hardworking family, and the needs to do away with dependencies and all its forms, which include financial dependence on the state. So, the form, sorry. The form function as some sort of interpretive schema that is given coherence to the messiness of the social and intimate life. The couple is responsible for producing official documents, official accounts of their relationship that fit into a provided structure and categories, or as law argue, the couples need to enact to version of reality, the official and the local at the same time. Because in dealing with the form, we usually do not have a say in what information is to be extracted from us. But these different types of information could be assembled and reassemble to produce a marriage migrant. The form also bring forward a figure of a sponsor, who is the British citizen. It brings forward a marriage migrant, a migrant who is monogamous, belong to a nuclear family grounded in marriage is in relationship based on individual choice, as opposed to influenced by immigration benefits, and is economically independent. So, let's finish this talk by asking not what makes someone's and marriage migrant, since we kind of talk touch on that a little bit but why should we look into these practices that make marriage migrants. So why do we need to look into the form, or the process of the application processes. And that's because by looking into the ways in which this group is produced. We need to see how, not just marriage migrant, but migrants or refugees are not a pre existing group, always there and ready for identification, but is enacted, they are being produced through these practices, and they are being enacted vis-a-vis the technology. So I think that is an important kind of concept to hold on to when we talked about where we have immigration debate is that there is no pre existing group, there is no, you know, migrant is being made is being produced through these practices. So, so yeah, that's, that's all I have, and I'll be happy to take questions afterwards. Thank you so much for being that is so interesting and so many questions already sort of coming to mind so I hope the audience has them as well. So far we've been introduced to three different but interlinking research projects on refugees and migrants that are trying to research these themes in the context of decolonizing knowledge. Some have sort of questioned how the system decides who matters who doesn't who is vulnerable who isn't, and also constitutes a family, but they've all been done in the context of Britain and Europe, specifically Italy. So the next two speakers will be instead taking us outside of Europe, and we will be starting with Professor Laura Hammond who teaches development studies at SOAS, who will be introducing new research project migration and displacement in the Horn of Africa. So she's leading a team, the research and evidence facility team which looks at questions of displacement. And so I think she is the best person to introduce this project so I'll pass over to Professor Laura Hammond. Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be on this on this panel and to hear about this great work that's going on. As as I just said, I'm going to shift us to geographically shift us but I think we're creating a kind of narrative here that that in which different presentations kind of speak to each other because we're all sort of coming at a similar set of issues from different perspectives but in I think some similar ways. So I wanted to just outline to you some work that I've been involved with actually it's not new it's been it's been going on for the last four years, which is a research consortium called the research and evidence facility. And we are made, I'm based at SOAS, I'm the team leader. It's a consortium made up of SOAS, the University of Manchester and Sahan Research which is a sort of think tank based in Nairobi. We are a team of about six kind of core members and as I'll discuss later on we work with a network of now over 50 researchers from the region and that's a really important part of what we do. We're funded by the European Union, and we were tasked by the EU to as part of the EU trust fund for for Africa to think about the broader context in which migration is happening. And we've kind of taken that and run with it and perhaps we've run with it in directions that go beyond what our funders ever envisioned. But I think that the ways we've taken it really speak to the themes that we're talking about today. So one of our interests in taking this on. Basically, at first I should say that our mandate is to look at migration mobility displacement within the Horn of Africa. So of course this was occasioned by the interest post 2015 with trying to understand the drivers of migration towards Europe. And the funding that came available for the EU trust fund was from EU members, some of whom had a real and were really interested in trying to find ways of minimizing migration to Europe. However, other states within the 28 member states were very much aware that there were other stories going on there are other things happening, and that actually movements towards Europe was just a tip of the iceberg of the wider set of issues around movement within the region within the Horn of Africa region by which I define nine countries from Eritrea in the north to Tanzania in the south, including both Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, etc. But there's a lot of mobility that's going on that's not well understood and if we just look at mobility as a story about people moving to Europe, then we're missing out on a whole range of other things that are going on. So, so we've taken that as a starting point. And we've tried to understand what are these other different dynamics, we don't, we haven't really for the most part looked much at people moving from the Horn of Africa to Europe. We have a little bit in terms of intentions, we did one study with our research associate, Susanna Jaspers, which looked at star fourie Sudanese migrants and refugees moving towards Europe but for the most part we focused on what happens in the region. And there you have a wider huge numbers point was made it's 14 million people who are estimated to be displaced within the region. And within that even wider set of people who are on the move who are not necessarily displaced, but are moving for perhaps for other reasons or a mix of different reasons. And so our research has really been focused on that and what we are is not a research project per se, but more a kind of research, but as a consortium that really aims at having multiple projects so we've done work on rural to urban migration we've done work on refugee hosting. We've done work on environmental migration displacement whatever you want to call it on youth employment, as a, as a, what, what difference does youth employment make to people's ideas about wanting to be on the move, or whole range of things. And so we've, we're kind of amassing this, this body of evidence through these multiple studies and now we're starting to look across the studies to see what does this tell us about migration mobility displacement. What does it tell us about development policy. What does it tell us about migration policy more generally, and and trying to feed that to our so called, you know, our client or funder, which is the EU but also broadly. In that process, I am thinking about this whole theme of decolonization and what does decolonization mean in the context of doing this kind of research. I wanted to focus on a few different types of ways of understanding that. The first is to try to decolonize in a sense, the narrative or the myth that migration the migration crisis, if you like, if you think of it as a crisis and I don't and that will be one of my second myths, but miss that we want to bust. But if you think about people on the move that the story is a story of people moving towards Europe is only a very is a piece of that. It's an important piece absolutely and as has already been said today. It really shines a very strong light into some of the presuppositions biases, forms of racism forms of exclusion that are existing in societies in which many of us gathered today are living in. But it's only a piece and there's there are other pieces of that that we need to understand more broadly we need to understand why people move under what conditions they move, what their experience of moving is, and I know, and how to respond to that best is it a problem but not a problem so that's my second issue is that, for the most part migration has been cast very much as a problematic. A sort of crisis that needs to be solved that people on the move have been at best inconvenient and at most threatening deeply problematic, we can see this in the current covert crisis that there's a huge amount of distrust hostility centered towards people who move. They're seen as being public health threats or you know disease carriers, when in fact they're the only thing they're doing is moving from one place to another they may be doing so without protection. But the fact of their movement is not the problem that it's the lack of protection that is the problem. So, our second kind of motive in the research that the ref does what we call the ref is to think about ways of understanding migration as not being problematic that that in a sense, we try to kind of narrow down the kind of movement which is unsafe or forced and say well that's problematic obviously we don't want to, you know, we need to try to find ways of assisting people of help providing greater protection to people who are on the move, who are not forced to or without any choice. And sometimes that's that criterion or that kind of definition becomes hard to determine so sometimes people might move out of for for economic aspirations for study aspirations but along the journey it's not subject to smuggling and trafficking networks to abuse, and they become forced migrants, but through the journey so there are problems with trying to figure out who we're actually talking about, but a great huge percentage of movement is not necessarily problematic it's what people do. It's, it's what people engaging to try to maximize their opportunities to take advantage of, you know, opportunities that they see to live out their dreams to reunite with their loved ones, whatever So those those aspects of mobility are really not problematic and what is problematic is that very often development and humanitarian frameworks get in the way of that movement they try to block people. They try to lock them in place to say you must be situated in one location in order to be served in order to be assisted or protected. Borders are closed refugee camps are closed, people are not allowed to move without documentation. This is a story that we've seen in the previous presentations in terms of movement into and within Europe, but it's also happening in places like the Horn of Africa. And so we're really trying to sort of decolonize in a sense that whole concept of migration as being problematic and this kind of scapegoating of the migrant which leads to all sorts of other really problematic kind of so dehumanizing processes. So, trying to look at the positive aspects of movement, trying to understand and unpick those narratives of power that are responsible for constructing such a narrative in the first place. In some senses we're trying to as well advise development policy about how to build mobility and considerations and protections of mobility of, you know, sort of positive mobility into their understanding of how development should be practiced. Migration shouldn't be seen migration shouldn't be seen as an aberration a thing people do as an exception to the rule if you like but it should be a core practice that many livelihoods are dependent upon and and sort of recenter our own development frameworks to follow the real practices that people are engaging in which we can see involves in many many cases involves mobility. So, it's been a long time here which is hard to see the other thing that is really important about this project is that we are working with a whole range of amazing talent from within the Horn of Africa. And I'll just sort of pick on that topic briefly and then I'm going to pass over to my colleague. So, who is has been one of our colleagues throughout the last four years and who I've worked for for more than 20 years I think I can explain a bit more what that looks like from his perspective, but we are a small team is really small team of, of kind of core researchers and what we do the way that we work is try to be as collaborative as possible in reaching out to independent researchers to universities to think tanks to teams of people in all of the different countries where we work to have them carry on the research sometimes together with us sometimes on their own to pride try to provide lots of opportunities for their own writing and their advocacy to shine through. So sometimes they're attending meetings and talking about the research that they're doing, and we're helping to facilitate that. And what are our ultimate goal is to try to be a catalyst for the researchers who are working in the region but very often are not joined up with each other. We haven't got the platforms to get the policymakers and the kind of audiences that they would like to reach to take note of the work they're doing and so we think that our own, our own kind of research and evidence platform can do that in a variety of different ways. So we really have worked very strongly at trying to get that work out there and to try to enable some of that, that work and the idea of the hope is that it creates a sustainable kind of legacy for the project that will continue to see a really vibrant community of researchers within the region, not at all to say that we've created that that platform but that we hopefully we've, you know, played an important role in making that happen. So I think that one just to finish up the final thing to say about work like this about consortia like these are that we have a huge amount of work to do at trying to decolonize the research process itself at trying to really engage on a much more equitable basis with the communities that we are researching for sure, but also with the communities that we are working with in places, whether they're, you know, in Africa, or in the UK, or in Europe, to try to level those inequalities to try to understand where those inequalities come from, and to do research in a different way. We hope that it's really taken forward that an important part of so called decolonizing the curriculum is also about decolonizing research and thinking about what role we all as researchers have to play in that process. I'll finish it there. Thanks. Thank you Laura. So now we move on to our last panelist and speaker and it is with extreme pleasure that we welcome Dr. Calliango Ronald Seba. We are very happy to have him here. He's joining us from Kampala, Uganda. He's a lecturer in the School of Women and Gender Studies and the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at Macarena University. He has a PhD and his topic was on returning home gender and choice among internally displaced persons in Guru district northern Uganda, but he's joining us here to talk about this collaboration with Laura and also his specific focus in it. So I'll pass over to you, Ronald. Thanks. Thanks, Alaya, and I'm glad to be here. It's always a pleasure to talk after Laura. And thank God we had to share to change places. But I'm from Macarena University projects and activities. One of them is decolonizing peace education, which is the one that we are working on. I'm also in that is focusing on coming up with a regional agenda on first displacement within the region. So allow me to share my screen. I have just a few notes to share and then I'll be done. What I would like to do here is basically to have a few reflections on the research and evidence facility from the Ugandan perspective of my engagement with what Laura has basically discussed. And the rave in the region has largely considered rural to urban migration, environmental movement, refugees displaced persons, and as well as cross-border mobility. And as she rightly mentioned, these are issues that are at the center of our discourse on migration and mobility within the region and not necessarily individuals moving across borders to other countries among others. And in so doing, it has drawn our attention to how local, national, regional and international processes influence our understanding of human mobility by taking a broader focus of the processes and the happenings within their migration world. It helps us to see how these processes are interlinked, how they work together or work against each other among others. For instance, it has brought to light how migration either voluntarily or involuntarily is interlinked and is impacted by national, regional and global policies aimed at migration management. If you look at, in the 1980s and the 90s, we always talked about fortress Europe. And whereby there are always barriers for people coming in and the barriers are always set very, very, very high to hinder people from entering Europe and from our perspective getting either Europe or the Americas is always considered as a great achievement. And sometimes one may ask you why did you ever go and never come back, should have stayed maybe, but basically because of the impact of their national and policies that are aimed at migration management, which not necessarily do not take into consideration why people move, how they move and how they view or how or take into consideration their own agency in terms of in such movements. Participation with the RIF also brings to light the recognition of the role of regional organizations, especially on the issue of mobility within the region and also beyond the region. And here in particular we are talking about intraragional mobility and the importance of intraragional mobility, I think has been brought to the fore by the current COVID-19 pandemic globally whereby we're not only looking at people moving from other countries into our countries, but we're also looking at mobility, people moving within the borders or within the regional borders, either for trade or for family reunifications or for marriages or for just visits or for education or for health or for a variety of reasons. So in looking at this we see that intraragional mobility also brings into the whole question of translocality, where we look at mobility, migration solution and spatial interconnectedness by people, whereby where because of immobility you're cutting off remittances to people, you're cutting off job opportunities among others, so you find that that interconnectedness is also disrupted because somebody who stayed home is not receiving what they would have received because somebody else is not able to be able to send in what they would have sent in for the survival of that particular individual. So in other words, what we also see is how international and regional approaches to migration largely remain ineffective without an appreciation of the socio-economic dimensions of the factors that drive mobility in the region. I like the presentation on marriage migrations and if you look, if you're looking at marriage migrations for instance, it brings out that you cannot appreciate the romance between individuals, it has to be structured in a particular way. So also in our case, how international and regional approaches in a way tend to structure migration but they remain ineffective in that by not taking into consideration why people are moving, it becomes very difficult. For instance, in some of the studies we've participated in like rural to urban migration, there is evidence to show that people will always move to areas of opportunity and not necessarily to a given destination. So what drives mobility is not so much about where am I going, but where is the opportunity? Is the opportunity in the immediate neighborhood or is it immediately across the borders? We've had nationals from Uganda going to South Sudan to work basically because they have been invited to work in South Sudan because there were opportunities there and sometimes it will not have been the right decision to go to if they had really wanted, but because there was opportunity people are able to move to that next destination. Then secondly, the evidence also shows that in rural to urban migration research, it brought to the fore the primacy of the concept of population mixing or mingling. This study was carried out in three cities. We had Gulu, Eldoret and Delidawa in Ethiopia, but one key aspect or one key connecting factor for all these issues was the population mixing. People coming together and living together, working together, and then from different walks of life and then they always come and meet in the cities to work together and live together. And this issue now has also been brought to the fore by the COVID-19 because also talking about populations mixing in closed spaces. And sometimes they're sharing accommodation, they're sharing transport, they're sharing sanitation facilities, the face issues of living in either the slum areas in the world to do areas among others because of how they come together and how they live together. And sometimes it also determines how they either participate or do not participate within the ongoings of the countries measures to prevent the COVID-19. Then the other one was basically translocality, which I think I've already alluded to and I will not waste much time on that. When we look at the REF and the decolonization agenda, in decolonization, one of the issues has been decolonizing research that has also been about decolonizing the curriculum. My take here is basically on the ways you transform or the ways the processes of knowledge production can be transformed. One thing participation in the REF has done, like Laura alluded to, was creating space for African migration scholars, not only to come together, but to also start a conversation amongst themselves. Quite often in migration studies, we have always participated in conversations but not between the African scholars that's always between the European or the American and then the African scholars. And we always meet each other in conferences among other places and say, okay, here we are now, how can we start a conversation amongst ourselves? So through the REF, at least, we've been able to see how those conversations have resulted into joint projects outside even the REF agenda or the EU agenda, and then we start talking amongst ourselves about issues that pertain to our own environments. Secondly, in the decolonization agenda, we have also seen extended boundaries to an appreciation of how global and regional as well as processes are interlinked to influence human mobility. I used to have a very narrow focus to Uganda and issues pertaining to Uganda and how it deals with the questions of migration, and then I will study about Tanzania and how they're dealing with the issues of migration among others. But when you take the discourse to a regional level and a global level, then you begin to learn and appreciate how these are interlinked and why it is important not only to think locally, but also to think globally and also to think in terms of how migration is interrelated across the borders. Then the other aspect about the decolonization agenda has always been the question of capacity building versus capacity sharing. Quite often, especially on the African continent, we are always promised to come and build our capacities. But under the rift, I think also something I've seen with the decolonizing peace education project that I'm currently working with is that there is more of capacity sharing, recognizing what the African scholars bring on the table for research, and also recognizing the differences and the similarities, the differences in abilities to write, in grants and grants-raising expertise, among others. So you find that by working hand side by side, there is not only a building of confidence, but there is also a better articulation of issues that arise as a consequence of the environment that we are surrounded with. And also to start to look at a kind of bottom-up process, looking at the problems that pertain to our own countries, not necessarily to be able to set our own research agenda. That's why I find that when the EU sets a research agenda of migrations to Europe, then it gives us an opportunity to also look at what are the issues that pertain to us within our own context to be able to address them in a better way or in a much more coordinated manner. So lastly, but not least, raises the question of how to build a visible research hub. For instance, bring together the African northern scholars in such a continuous, sustainable way to what the northern countries would realize within our own regions, and maybe documents to find a solution on how to address some of these things. Thank you so much. I'll end it there for now. Thank you. Thank you so much for that presentation, which actually also concludes on a very important point about how to build collaboration, how to decolonize knowledge, and yes, promote them more. I wouldn't use the word inclusive but a much broader and mixed research. So we already have a few questions from the audience, which we can start sharing with the panelists. I guess the way this will work is, if there's a general question, you can share your videos and unmute if you want to speak, and also use this first introductory space if you want to also raise points with each other because I think all the presentation, all these research projects talk to each other as well, so it might be nice to have a conversation between panelists too. But there was one last question, which was directed to Professor Laura Hammond, but I guess it could be addressed to all the presenters on this panel, and that is to sort of expand a little bit more on the decolonizing of our research methods, and also sort of that links to the theme of this panel, which is really to think about and give examples through your research projects of how we can think, teach, discuss migration, issues around migration and refugees in a decolonized context. So I guess I'll pass over to you and maybe we can sort of start with Laura, moving on to Ronald, Paran, Sarah and Maya. Great, thanks. I'll be brief. I mean, I think that question was probably posted right before. Calliango gave his talk because I think he gave some great examples of how what happens when research is not decolonized and what some of the ways are that we're trying to address those inequalities, but just to say, if you think about research processes from just from the very moment of a researcher, whether it's a PhD researcher or a grant recipient, a senior career person, it doesn't really matter. The ways that we go about doing this research, we talk about my project, we set up a design, hope, and I'm talking about kind of a caricatured format, but the typically the ways that research design and implementation and dissemination write up all of that publishing has been done has been by a single person who's in charge of a research endeavor. And very often that research, as we know, is not carried out by a single person, but there are translators, fixers, research assistants, senior researcher colleagues in whatever they may be, who are also playing a role in this research and they very often don't get given credit recognition, but they also just very often not involved in the whole process. So they might be involved just in data collection, this is the typical kind of mistake that's made is that, you know, you hire collaborators in whatever country you're working in and they implement the research questionnaire that you and maybe some others have come up with and feed the data back they often don't have control over don't have access to even that data once they've gathered it. They're not able to use it in their own research, the writing pieces of writing that come out of that very often don't include their names or if they do they're just as a sort of thank you at the end, or in the acknowledgments. So there's just a whole load of ways in which and and the and the in the inequality over and over again. And unless we think very clearly about how the research process does replicate those inequalities we're just going to continue to do it. So, and it takes not just researchers thinking about it it takes research funders, it takes universities, it even it takes collaborators as well who are used to being dealt with in a particular way and who don't ask or demand more. So, I, it takes a kind of revolution in the way that research is going on but those are the kinds of things that I was thinking of when I said, decolonize research and I think that Kalyangos examples of the ways in which that's starting to change hopefully bears, you know, offer a glimmer of hope that we might be starting to, to reorient things. And Kalyango, would you like to add something. Yes, I think I would add very, very briefly. I think just like Laura has said, it's a process, it takes for us to unlearn some of the things that you have known for a long time, and to implement them in a better way. But just in relation to the presentation, beyond that, in the current project we are involved in decolonizing peace education, one of the things we are doing is to listen to the voices of the people that we are working with, which also has a process to kind of a way change the methodologies that have been known to within the social sciences to integrate the arts based methodologies, such as storytelling, photo voice among others to, to give much voice to the people that we are researching and that we are working with and to give them an ownership of the kind of research that they are presenting, participating in, and then they feel like which also empowers them that their voices are heard, and then their issues can be addressed, and then they can be confident and comfortable tomorrow to be able to participate in future studies and other researches. So I think just briefly, it is also about knowledge sharing, accepting capacity of the African scholars, for instance, and also working very, very closely with those that are taking part and also working together with all others that are involved in such a way that it's not just to look at I'm superior and you are junior, but we are all more or less at the same level, and everybody has something to contribute to the table. I think that's one of the key issues that has been missing in some of the, what I would call the colon, colonially best researchers, like Laura says, do the data collection share with the writing, but here we see that there is a more blended writing and sharing of skills, and then in that way you have a more, a more, a more genuine. I think we may have lost the connection. I mean would you like to go next. Yeah, I don't have much to add on, but I'm. Oh sorry, my connection is pretty bad. I, when we were talking about decolonizing research method, I think the traditional way of doing research is that we have an outsider going in doing research on this community and it makes me think about certain research methodology that kind of really troubles that insider outsider. And for example, I could think of auto ethnography, where as an insider you, you, you're not really an, well you are an insider but so it's kind of trouble that the economy of you going in and researching this particular group. It would be a good methodology to, to do to use, and then there's also other things like participatory action research. So, so yeah that's kind of what I had in mind when we were discussing decolonizing the research method. Thank you very much. Sarah, would you like to add something. There were also a couple of questions in the chat directed to your own research specifically. And so I was wondering if you also wanted to address those while you're answering the question about decolonizing research methods. I think that's the easiest way to organize. I can do that and I have to have a, I had a quick look at the question. In terms of decolonizing, I think it's really difficult to do that but some of the issues have already been raised like in terms of citation practice in terms of sharing knowledge between North and South scholars and not kind of valorizing one kind of knowledge or epistemology and other and also in terms of how you how you do the research. I was very much influenced by Linda to you are Smith's book which is now 20 years old decolonizing methodologies. What are the practices around, you know, what do we mean by giving voice and how do we allow for counter narratives to emerge in a research practice and to create a research practice that she refers to trying to create researchers who doesn't replicate some of the research in the past such as I don't know the history of ethnography for example is a history of colonialism observation interference and control so you know how do you do ethnography in a manner which is not kind of replicating this sort of a drop down approach and how do we engage in what my supervisor Yasmin got in the right and reverse was empirical humility so to try and do research that's less instructive and to engage in other knowledge and in particularly in relation to migration the whole crisis narrative and I think through linking the connections of the past is really valuable and you know decentering and reversing the kind of Eurocentric lens so the research Laura mentions and you know much much migration is actually south to south and yet it's presented quite often as a this crisis of Europe which is actually a minimal as as all the speakers and putting out a minimal amount of movement. And the whole thing of my migration is a problem and our role as researchers is not feeding in into that you know it was like the way in which the figure of the migrant is constructed how do you do that as a research that you don't feed in into that and draw on different knowledge practices sorry that was a bit waffly but. Okay. In terms of the questions. How will brexit affect the UK's policies and unaccompanied minors to be honest I haven't really been working on the UK for the past four years because I've been focusing on Italy and Brexit just generally a mess and undecided, but I believe it impacts more upon family reunion. Because it will be much more difficult for unaccompanied minors in Europe to access the UK, the UK has pretty restrictive policies for unaccompanied minors anyway and generally returns or makes people. So, irregular after the age of 18 so yeah I'm afraid I'm not that that they with with that argument. How is the denigration of immigrant childhood integral to the rejection of immigrants. So I think my. I'm not sure if I miss the question but in relation to my research the value of childhood that gives and the deserving this the vulnerability of a child that gives a migrant the right, an unaccompanied minor, the right to stay in Europe the problem then becomes when they become an adult. And then become the folk devil threat and in and the state is no longer obliged to host them so it's a form of temporary hospitality and a kind of false morality in my research I do look at kind of how the construct of a child is vulnerable to a passive incapable being is also relates very often to kind of colonial mentality around colonial subjects who are portrayed as child like and incapable and as opposed to the adult rational subject or the colonizer. So I think that that's quite an important element and then also the whole notion of childhood is a socially constructed concept, which is, you know, we've been recognized for years in childhood studies but then when you come to migration because you have these rigid binaries and these restrictive racialized policies also my as spoken about, then you get this rigid binary of age reinforced and outpourings of supposed compassion towards children, and then that's totally lost when they come become adults so it's a kind of I think other scholars have raised the issue of the politics of compassion and what does that what does that mean and it depoliticizes things. I think that's all the questions for me. The slides I would rather you just use the recording if that's okay for my slides because their amadeus drawings and I've agreed when I use them I agree with him what they're used for so it would be okay if there was something in particular I could share some of the references or something if that was what you wanted but I think if it's recorded you should be able to see them anyway. So I think that's everything I don't think the final question about weaponization is necessarily for me. I will address that to the whole panel. There's also another one coming in so I'm very aware of zoom fatigue, especially in these days of virtual events and conferencing so, but we keep your questions coming. So by here, the event was scheduled until three so we'll, we'll answer all the questions that are addressed to us, but I wanted to pass over to Maya and ask what her thoughts were on sort of decolonizing our research methods and how to think, teach or discuss issues around migration refugees in a context that's trying to decolonize knowledge. Yeah, I'm not sure I have that much to add I agree with a lot of what has been said, I suppose one of the questions that we should continually ask ourselves is what exactly we mean by decolonizing and I think I guess some of the speakers have sort of answered sometimes this sort of this term is used quite a lot in a way that lacks some specificity. And so I guess returning to that as well as thinking about what do we mean when we're talking about decolonizing as well as things as well as knowledge production I think we're also talking about the material which some people have touched on and so this isn't I guess this isn't directly about my own research methods but outside of my research on migration in the UK. My PhD was on British international development discourse and the relationship between that and race. And one of the things I found that is really widely known and has been written about is really widely known in the international development sector is that people who are classes international workers. And so if even if you if you go abroad if you say from the UK and you go abroad and you work in India for instance doing international development, you will most likely be paid more than other people who were born or living in India who are not classes international local workers and so when we're I don't know whether this falls under decolonizing by suppose if we're thinking about inequalities and thinking about knowledge is valued. This is also comes down to the this material inequality how the two are interlinked. Some knowledge is seen as more important than others is seen as more is international generalizable and others is not and I think thinking about the material there is incredibly important and if we're thinking about value. And one of the things I just wanted to really quickly say that I didn't have time to as well as I suppose when we're thinking about things like migration and asylum where my 100% agree with everything that's been said about where the focus often lies and that this is actually movement is is global and is not people are not always often moving to countries in the so called global but I think actually the way that that's framed shapes the debate here and so one of the things that I would just say is that Lucy Mablin who's based at Sheffield where I'm also based here's a book called asylum after empire if you're interested in these debates it's worth reading because what she argues is in the mainstream refugee literature on refugees and asylum seekers. The argument seems often is a restrictive legislation which was increasingly introduced from the 80s onwards in countries like the UK that this was a result of increased numbers of people coming to claim asylum in countries like the UK, what she actually argues is that this wasn't just about increased numbers this was about who was coming and so whilst asylum people claiming asylum seeking asylum refugees have been great in number in the global south obviously you only have to look at take a cursory glance at the history of partition in India for instance to know this but the way that it's seen is that increased numbers of people were coming from the global south in this period to the so called global north and this is sort of what was one of the reasons why increasingly restrictive asylum legislation was introduced in countries like the UK and also across Europe and what she argues is actually she has a quote which is that these people were racialized because these colonial discourses of this sort of colonial hierarchy whilst it's shifted and changed still shapes who is seen as a threat and who isn't as we talked about a length in this panel and so she says that it's actually it's not these people suppose a difference that is the reason why that these policies are introduced but the way that they are marked is different this difference is produced and so I suppose if we're thinking about unsettling some of the some of the narratives around asylum migration in countries like the UK is about engaging with those colonial histories to understand why it is the asylum debate that we have now this sort of moral panic we have this very moment that that is rooted in these racialized colonial discourses of belonging and not and so I would just sort of flag up her work as a as someone to have to have a look at in terms of maybe like shifting how we understand that debate around asylum in the UK and Europe Thank you very much and so I'm aware of timing and I think we've got a couple more questions and unless anybody else is going to post anything in the Q&A box we'll start drawing the panel to a close So I would like to ask the panelists to anyone who has an answer to Rubina's question who asks do nations involved in invasion weaponization exploitation of developing countries and destruction of the infrastructure and lives of civilians not have any legal responsibility towards the refugees they create under international law and I guess I'm just going to add to that sort of point there is a interesting refugee series series going on exhibition going on at the Imperial War Museum in London at the moment which I visited and I encourage anybody who is in London to go and visit it because I mean apart from the information it presents it's interesting to think about the space where it is presented how the research projects of various universities I mean I remember I think University of Birmingham is there Oxford with some fantastic work being summarized and presented to a general audience within a space such as the Imperial War Museum so I think it's really interesting to kind of link the two sort of the war, the weaponization, the exploitation and then sort of creating a space where to highlight questions of movement in a critical way and yes and obviously as Rubina sort of highlights it you know where the responsibility lies under the sort of international law so whoever wants to feel free to answer that question please raise a pass over to Laura I can speak something, say something about that. I'm glad you mentioned the Imperial War Museum exhibition because I was involved in the advisory panel of that exhibition so I had a lot of really interesting front row seat to thinking about how those narratives that you see when you visit it were actually constructed and what were the messages that the museum wanted to get across which I'll come to in a second but just to take the question itself briefly there's absolutely a responsibility of those who are parties to an armed conflict to bear responsibility for civilians affected by that conflict but which means that very often in terms of reconstruction of areas affected by war, physical reconstruction but also assisting civilians who are displaced there is a responsibility but it tends to question about whether or not that then applies also to refugees for instance once they're outside the country once they're in a safe place whether or not you can argue that that safe place is the ideal place for them whether you know or even the end of their journey. That's where responsibility tends to become less clear cut I guess, well, less clear cut to some, let's just say, but you're absolutely right that there is there's a responsibility on the part of parties to a conflict to take some responsibility and that's why you see, you know, if you pick apart who's responsible or who's providing the most resources for a particular migration scenario. You often find that those who are involved in the conflict bear some play a role in providing some assistance and that can be problematic as well I mean if you look at Saudi Arabia's involvement in Yemen for instance where it claims that it's carrying out humanitarian work at the same time that it's basically perpetuating the conflict itself it's it's really highly problematic but anyway. But the thing to say about the museum, and I do hope that people go see it it's open until May 24 I think 2021 is that it does try to break down the the story the experience of a variety of different people who have been on the move as a result of war of its objectives is to try to show that displacement is a responsibility of those who carry out war and they should see it as part of the story of what happens to a society that's affected by war. And with ultimately the goal of how hoping that more will take responsibility for it, but it does it in an interesting way it breaks it down and along the different journeys. It's very much reflective of the museum's own holdings and so it's very focused on Europe and stories that the UK had an involvement in. And we and I was involved as an advisor trying to bring in some of those research projects to try to broaden the story both in terms of depth but also in terms of geography to try to get more coverage of areas that the IWM doesn't normally look at so hopefully that comes across when you when you see it, but it's a it's a really interesting exhibition. Thank you very much anyone else. I think Laura you answered that question beautifully so we'll probably have one last question and use this as a kind of closing remarks from all the panelists. And again I'm going to sort of rely on our audience and sort of open it up also. The last question was whether you have any suggestions on how we can make the system fairer I think all of you have very specific work on very specific parts elements of the system that comes to create this immigration system so hopefully you'll all answer and also maybe sort of say a few words of how what the future of the immigration system holds especially in a world marked by COVID a global pandemic technology, sort of revolution climate change and how this is going to sort of our rethinking of movement. Is it going to solidify sort of borders? Is it going to create new opportunities? I know it's a little bit unfair for its broadness but hopefully it's something that you think on in your daily lives and can sort of answer in relation to also your specific research projects. So maybe Laura we'll start with you and then we'll go in the order of the speakers that were that presented so you all know who goes next and Maya over to you. And I'm really trying to keep it quite short because there's a lot you could say and I suppose just to answer the question that's asked about how to make the system fairer it's like other than having not having restrictions you said which would be my like ideal. I mean I think there's a number of things you can do within the UK immigration system such as getting rid of reducing the fees and reducing legal aid and not treating people differently in terms of the certain visa categories and which when you come into the country you either can't claim citizenship or you aren't able to access rights that you should I think you should be able to so there's a number of things that could be done around that but I think that one of the problems is that we are seeing in many ways. At least from the perspective of the UK and so I know this is limited a real hardening of not only the immigration system but the discourse around it and I think one of the important things I would just say is one of the ways that this has manifested in the past few years and I think this will increasingly happen is politicians in the UK are warning about large numbers of people having to come to countries like the UK because of the climate crisis and this being used as a once a reason to act on the climate crisis all of that isn't actually being done in the way that needs to be but at the same time like a strengthening of what are ethno-nationalist borders and I would say that the discussion we've had here is particularly important for understanding that because actually although the climate crisis is very real and the way that people are being impacted now is very very real much of that movement is within countries within regions and is not to places like Europe and the UK and this argument is being reused incredibly cynically in order to help feed what is already a really really toxic debate and help strengthen a very toxic immigration system and so I think as I sort of I'll end I guess as I sort of ended before which is that it's about as many other people have said it's about centering the border, critiquing the border as actually something that needs to be dismantled as opposed to strengthened and I think that's where the pushback we increasingly need to be Yeah so I just pick up I guess on climate migration as that is now the project that I'm working on and I think it's fundamentally important to stress despite ongoing media narratives of skirmongering and many newspapers recently as Maya said, people who are induced to move due to climate change is essentially related to many other factors you can't isolate out climate change and it's within a country, possibly cross border to a closer country and very very small amounts of people get to travel get overseas essentially because most vulnerable people that get into the most difficulty and you need money to migrate we've done some work in Cambodia and that's been in just to kind of link into COVID as well. Many Cambodians close to the border with Thailand migrate across border and work in Thailand, and that's deeply problematic and again it's related to migration control and migration policies and the lack of access to safe and regular channels to engage in migration if that's what you wish to do for opportunities and so it's about creating safer ways to migrate and understanding how and why and what conditions people migrate so apparently people despite it being returned because of COVID from Thailand into Cambodia are still returning back to some are still crossing the border in extremely dangerous conditions without any access to social protection open to exploitation because they don't have any option for earning any income otherwise so as one of our respondents put it the stomach is stronger than the fear they need to migrate for money and we've seen that you know the way in which the Mediterranean sea is essentially become a death bed for for for many many migrants and completely unnecessarily you have spent huge amounts of money on border controls and it's just leading to more and more death so far and migration would be her and in an ideal world again so it's a matter of removing these restrictions or at least allowing for greater temporary forms of migration or safe access of migration. Yeah, I'll hand over to Parine. Thank you. I don't have much to add because I think the panelists have proposed a lot of interesting kind of suggestions on how to make a fair immigration system right just I think the most important things is kind of reshift that narrative on migration and it's not a crisis because that's often we see that a lot but and I guess this is coming from kind of my research background is that I think it's important for us to kind of dissect what makes someone a migrant because then we could see that it's a process and it's the unfairness of the process that makes someone a migrant and and then from there we kind of shift the narrative and and also kind of imagine what is this you know the current immigration system now it create a preferable world but not for people like me for example as a migrant so it's create a preferable world for so we kind of imagined and speculate as opposed to kind of what would be a fair world for people like us and so yeah I think the most important step would be to kind of shift that narrative that we're having and we see that a lot in the media so yeah. Yeah I guess I'm coming in next I think that the points been made that we need to as researchers we all have a responsibility to counter misinformation and the miss what you might call the miss association of different things so you know yes as Maya says there are people on the move because of climate change environmental change but they're not necessarily moving towards Europe that's something that the research and evidence facility shown really clearly that when people are displaced for environmental reasons that tends to be that they move at the very end of their coping strategies and they move to the nearest safe and sustainable place to live which is usually the nearest city which might or may not be outside their country of origin but they don't have the ambition or the economic resources to travel more further afield. So this is an example of where these different narratives get mixed together to further political ambitions here for this example here in the UK. I think things like the Imperial War Museum exhibition is really helpful because it reaches a new audience like here we all are we're probably all preaching to the converted we're all share the same sense of outrage. But that's the audience that's going to walk through that museum we hope will not be people who are used to these kinds of debates and arguments and are not aware of some of the data and information that we have to share with them so that's what one of the things that's really exciting about it there's a small panel in in the exhibition that I took a picture of and I'm just looking at it now on my phone which shows the top five countries with the largest refugee populations. All five of them have more than a million refugees coming of course with Turkey at 3.68 million down to Germany with with a million and then there's a tiny little bubble which shows the UK's refugee population at 130,000 really small examples of representations of information that show the kind of correct miss out misunderstandings or miss perceptions that we have about migration and the UK I think are really important to to bring out and hopefully you know that's that's certainly not the only place but that's useful I think because it's hopefully reaching as I said an audience that won't be aware of that the comparative statistic and hopefully they'll take it away with them but you know it's the same the same in in Africa where we work you know we're trying to use for example Uganda which has a great. In many ways has a very, very impressive refugee hosting policy to try to use that as an example for the other countries in the region to take advantage of to try to adopt some of it's not perfect but it does in kind of trying to share that method and that approach it does try to dispel some of the ideas that refugee hosting the refugees pose a security threat that they pose a jobs threat public health threat whatever it is to show some good examples from within the region that could be picked up in other ways so there's a lot of different ways one can carry out this myth busting but I think we as researchers need to work together to do a lot more of that. I guess I'm the last person here and my take on the question of fair, how can we make the system fair. I think for me it also raises the question of fair for whom and who makes it fairer for the others among others. For my quick response here would be that we need evidence best research and data to inform decision making at all levels, either from the sending countries or the receiving countries and within the countries and it reminds me of a story of what one of my colleagues Michael Collier from the invest of Sussex one time wrote and the issue was I went as far as my money could take me and the idea here was that if someone had known what it would cost to move they would never have moved. They would have stayed in the places where they were, and then they would have carried out their activities without necessarily moving across the borders to another place. So, so in this way I think our take it would be to have evidence that informs the populations about what's happening, what the opportunities are among others, and then we can better respond to the questions of migration. But also the question of opportunities also requires us to look beyond just the migration bit, but also look at the livelihoods, look at the terms of trade that we are having such as another WTO among others that can empower nation states to be able to and what is their share in terms of development and to be able to manage the livelihoods of their host countries among others to better respond, and also to reduce the question of who moves, why they move the displacements among others. So briefly that's that's what I think would be my take on the fairer for whom. Thank you. Okay, so I think the panel has drawn to a close I would like to thank all the speakers for their time and for sharing their work with us. I would also like to thank the audience for joining us. I mean a lot of you have stayed for almost two hours so just sure is testament to how thought provoking the research that is being produced is. Thank you to Stephanie behind the scenes and Dr Amina yakin director of the source festival of ideas for making this possible. And do look at all the other events that are taking place. As I said, it's a week long series of virtual events, some amazing research being presented. And at three o'clock so in about seven minutes, there is going to be a poetry masterclass with Suhaima Mansoor Khan, author of slam poetry book post colonial banter and also co author of the book a fly girl flies guide to university. So hopefully, a few of you will move over to this poetry masterclass, which looks very promising. So thank you all. Have a lovely afternoon. Thank you.