 Welcome everyone once again. Let's talk about social inclusion and we'll start by asking this question. So how can we make cities more inclusive for migrants? I have two speakers today with me, Niroshan Hamashandran from Hedgill University and Claudio Di Matteo from Lund University. And I've invited our two speakers to explore with us how social work can help create cities where everyone feels welcome, where everyone feels safe, supported. So I'll invite you to join us. Let's dive into the latest research and practice on inclusive cities and social work with migrants using in this case, Sweden and UK as examples. Niroshan, Claudio, welcome. Yep, thank you for inviting us. I will start with you, Claudio, first. So maybe it's a bit obvious but inclusive cities are important for the overall well-being of all residents, including migrants. So I believe this is the core relevance of the topic of your article. Yeah, thank you for inviting us to discuss our paper and basically me and Niroshan, we wanted to know more about inclusive, or discuss more about inclusive urban cities linked to migration because we thought it is underlooked in research, especially in social work research. But we also think that it's such an important topic to address the social justice, economic development and sustainability issues that, and especially in urban cities, the link between individuals' well-being and their relationship with spaces, with institutions, with access to resources is of particular interest. And especially when we talk about inclusive cities, we touch upon a very important aspect of the living together. So considering well-being of established residents and newcomers, and among the newcomers, considering migrants and the specific needs of different migrant population and recognizing the access of urban areas, then there depends really the integration and the participation of all inhabitants is necessary to feel part of the community. Yeah. Niroshan, something to add? Yeah, I would like to add that cities actually play an important role. More and more migrants actually moving towards cities than countryside because cities are the places where they could find employment. Cities are the place where they could actually feel like they are doing something because if they move towards countryside, countryside creates problems for them because they don't have opportunities for employment, opportunities to find proper housing, and then they also have issues with the majority community in those countryside. So for them, urban cities or cities are useful and important because they could even find social connections over there. By reading your article and revealing a bit from what you told us, you mentioned that there is a lack of knowledge and research on social work engagement with social inclusion. So this is what you wanted to focus on then? So this is the gap you wanted to fill, Claudia? Yeah. I mean, of course, this is scoping review. So we focus on specific gaps in research, but yeah, we were hoping to find really new knowledge and new information, especially because we, I mean, me and Yiddishan, we met to a conference and we started to talk and we realized there is no, we don't know much about it and we wanted to know more and we wanted to see at what point social work research, like how much we develop knowledge and we develop instruments and tools to understand what makes an inclusive cities and how do we define inclusive cities? Promising. Claudia, let us know about the findings. Nerošan, do you want to? Oh, Nerošan, sorry, please. Yeah, I would add something to the previous point and then I'll move on to main findings. But the important part of this research is that the role of social work with migrants is not clearly defined. We are using social work for more statutory services like social welfare support, social benefits. So that includes everyone. But when we talk about social work with migrants, it's all about the voluntary sector, voluntary social work. We talk about charities, third sector organizations and GEOs and refugee community organizations. So that's something that triggered us to consider this topic. So what are we really doing? Do we really have social work playing an important role in including or migrant inclusion in cities? So now with the findings, first of all, it was kind of interesting. We have different levels of approach towards social work and inclusive cities in Sweden and the UK. So if you look at the English of UK context, there are lots and lots of studies. I went closer to 96,000 studies with my initial survey. So it's because in the UK, we have more studies looking at migration sector. But then at the end, we had around 10 papers that are actually looking at migration, social work and inclusive cities. So you could see that we are looking at the majority of the researchers looking at, yes, migration, but we have just minority of scholars looking at social work, inclusion and migrants in cities. So that's one of our key findings. Claudia, would you like to add something? Yeah, to this point, because we did compare Sweden and UK, I think that it's interesting because in Sweden, the debate, even on migration is very little because my survey was about 6,000 records found. But I would say one of the elements is because we only used English literature. So we know what Swedish literature to written in English stays. So that's an aspect. But anyhow, me and Hiroshin, we had 10 paper each that we figured out were really keen on understanding this interconnection between migration, inclusive cities and social work. Let's stay still in Sweden and with you, Claudia. I'm curious to know more about policy implications for the Swedish case. What can you tell us about that? So if we can look back or look zoom in in specific findings, we saw that there are four, let's say components or elements that are really strong for the Swedish context. The first is the role of stakeholders and especially the role of community or grassroots movements in mobilizing and voicing out the demands of migrant women. Sorry, I study migrant women of migrant population. So that's the first element which can be for sure understood also as in terms of improving and supporting the actions of these grassroots movements in specific cities in the biggest cities, I would say in Sweden. And then the social culture, sorry, yeah. The second element is the social cultural context which is very relevant in Sweden. And in particular, I would say sport activities are used in specific vulnerable areas to promote a kind of interactions and a kind of leisure time that over time can create friendship, can create a sense of community and prevents let's say criminalization or getization and exclusion. And then there is, it was very important in the past, now it's a bit less important, but the social spatial context in relation to access to social housing or affordable housing with the governments in the past where they engaged in it to facilitate the access to housing from migrant women in person communities. And finally, the migrant experience of inclusion. So how do we involve and engage the migrant population in participate in the process of and in the access to education, employment, health and an overall sense of well-being, of being in place in the community. Perfect, Nerošan, let's jump into the UK now. So after considering your findings what can you tell us about public policy implications, individual choice? What can you say? Yeah, I would say that what we have to consider is that we have different stakeholders in our society. They're dealing with migrant. So first of all, the policy approach should consider those people when they try to develop any policies related to inclusion and immigrants in our society. We cannot just exclude them. If you look at the general idea sometimes they just stop down policies. Some members of parliament comes up with some ideas. They went to the parliament and they bring it as a policy and then ask grassroots organizations to apply it. So it's not the right way to approach social inclusion. So the social inclusion starts from the very bottom. So the stakeholders themselves. So for example, there are refugee community organizations. So those organizations are actually created by immigrants themselves or refugees themselves. So we should start from them, we should ask them rather than telling them, okay, we have this why don't you apply these policies? Why don't you apply these actions? So the second one is that I would again go back to the social cultural context. So what we have to understand is that we cannot apply the same size fits all approach when it comes to my immigrant inclusion because each and every city in our society are completely different in terms of economic condition, in terms of opportunities, in terms of even geography or spatial aspect. So we have to consider that. This is where the cities comes into play because we had to ask this question, do we have a good minority ethnic community in cities to support social inclusion? So one of our key findings was that ethnic diversity in cities would actually promote inclusion because you could see me, I'm a person of color myself. I would be happy to see people from my country. I would be happy to speak my language with people in my society. So that means that, okay, I'm not alone here. There are people in here. So then that makes me feel like I'm being kind of included in the society. They are acknowledging me, they are accepting me. And then if we look at the social spatial context, so we also have to consider these availability of physical spaces for immigrants because they are moving from one country to another country. So they would expect some aspects such as parks or open spaces or open libraries and especially shopping facilities. So especially the aspect of where you could find actually is the specific type of spices to cook because we don't wanna use the spices made in the United Kingdom because it never gives us the taste. So likewise, immigrants also look for those special amenities and facilities. Okay, I'm living in the city. I can find my food. I can find ingredients for my food. Or I can go to this public park where I could find people. I could find people from my country of origin. So that connects people towards their communities and that promotes social inclusion. And then finally, policies should also consider migrants' experiences. Again, I'm going back to the idea of top-down and bottom-up approaches. So this is another aspect of bottom-up approach to social inclusion. We should speak to them. We should really try to understand their experiences because migrants feel included when they have opportunities available to them. So for example, they are feeling included if they could apply for jobs, if they could find employment, if they could find proper, suitable, affordable housing, if they could find other opportunities for social connections. So policies should consider these four aspects. So one is the role of stakeholders in the socio-cultural context in each city and the socio-spatial context in each city and their experience of migrants themselves in those cities. And then I would also like to highlight that social inclusion is context-specific. So we cannot apply general policies to each and every city. It should be for those cities themselves because it has different socioeconomic condition with the proportion of ethnic communities or proportion of population. So social inclusion should focus on that local context. Perfect, well, you have brought both of you two different contexts for us to compare and to explore. So I'm curious now to know about future steps in research. Let's start with you, Claudio. So what else is there to explore this topic? More geographies, more case studies, what is it? I would say I totally agree with what has been said by Nira Shen and I think we are both actually migrants in each of the contexts where we work. And but what we bring, I think, or we try to bring is this global local connection that should be always present. So what has been said about these four different components it has to be addressed in each or could be addressed in each and every context of research, of policies, of practices. And at the same time, the context specific elements then can, let's say, bring into life this very basic concept of supporting stakeholders or supporting social cohesion with activities, general activities, cultural activities and so on. And also support specific migrant networks and I mean, because I realize, for instance, being in Sweden that there are actually not many Italians so I would not be able to access Italian networks here. But so make sure anyhow that the possibility of me socializing or even access to food which is Italian food, it should be present. So all this, I think, yeah, is a way to move forward both research and policy practices. What would you add to this, Nerošan? Yeah, I think you kind of gave us your answers with your questions. I would say, yes, we should have more research without the divide of global south and global north. So the one problem with our overall research is that we tend to focus more on global north and we don't really get perspective so experienced from global south. But in reality, we have also migrants moving towards global south too. So we could conduct studies looking at those different contexts, global south and global north countries. And the other one is that, yes, now United Kingdom is out of the European Union. It is, again, it's an interesting case study how UK is actually applying its own policies and rules and regulations or practices to include people, include immigrants in their society and compare it to other European countries. And when I say that it doesn't need to be the Western European countries, we could also look at Eastern European countries or the down south. So we have these different geographical contexts where we could actually compare them. And the other important part is the empirical studies. Of course we like empirical studies. So as qualitative scholars, we would like to have more qualitative empirical studies, but then it will give us more information. So as we said earlier, migrants' experiences are important. So conducting primary research with them could give us more information. What do they think? How do they feel? Because sometimes the problem is that, yes, we develop policies, but then those policies or the consultations on those policies doesn't really, don't really reach to those population in our society. So we could include more qualitative studies or in general research, primary research studies to collect firsthand information so we can actually apply or contribute to developing new policies in different countries and different cities. With some recommendations for future research. Nira Shan, let's stay with you. Recommended materials to complement this topic. What would you recommend? We found a couple of interesting research areas, a couple of good practices. One is that in Quebec, there is a coalition of inclusive municipalities. So we could look at that, the ideas of inclusion. So they have 96 cities as members of this coalition of inclusion, inclusive municipalities. So they are publishing reports on intercultural and inclusive practices in multi-ethnic settings. So we could learn from them. Of course, Canada is also a country that actively promotes inclusion, integration, and then they want to make people feel good in those countries and feel welcome in those countries. So Quebec is a good example. And then we also have other examples from the UK too, inclusive cities for all, that is a project involving EU cities in EU countries funded by the European Union. Perfect, Claudia, what about in your case, what would you recommend? Yeah, it was just maybe another idea is to look at city alliance, which is a more international network of cities from all around the world, without distinction really, and they share good practices and knowledge on specific projects they do. And for instance, in Italy, Bologna came to know a project that was made in US and replicated by adapting it to the social, economic, cultural context of Bologna. And so I think this transfer of knowledge is between research, municipalities, so political local leaders, and good practices that's very important to keep in mind. I also add another point. It's maybe a self citation. We recommend reading our article. It's a good marketing, and of course, it's a good recommendation. For those who are watching on, let's talk about social inclusion website, there's the button there to access the article that has been discussing here with Claudia and Niro Shen. This has been a straight on the point conversation, so I would like to ask you now, each of you, to give a punchline. If someone just turned up to listen to this conversation and you wanted to pass the most important information very quickly and briefly, what would it be? Niro Shen, let's start with you. Oh, that's a pressure on me then. Yes, inclusive cities are important. They play a huge role in each and everyone's lives in their spatial context. So migrants move towards cities. So we have to consider cities as important. The other point is that as I said earlier, social inclusion is context specific. So we cannot apply one size fits all approach to social inclusion. So we have to be more specific. We have to learn from our communities and stakeholders. Claudia? I wish and hope that social work research and in general research could create a space alongside policy practice recommendation to really removing barriers to inclusion and to acknowledge migrant experiences and the important of the subject in producing tools and knowledge and instruments for inclusion. Straight to the point. Claudia, Niro Shen, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Rodrigo. It's a great pleasure for us to share our findings and research. It's our pleasure. Thank you. For those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources and materials that has been discussed in this conversation. As I said, let's talk about social inclusion website. You can also listen to this episode whatever you get your podcast in audio format. There's a newsletter you can subscribe to and of course follow us on Twitter at Kojitatiu LTA.