Race, Nation and Migration

This blog series, launched in February 2021, reframes thinking on the relationship between (im)mobilites, race and the national. Curated by Julia O’Connell Davidson and Bridget Anderson it brings together eight key scholars whose work examines the connections between these three areas. The series highlights the need to understand these connections in order to redress historic and contemporary injustice, tackle racism and affect systemic change in immigration and citizenship regimes.

Mural in Roma Sur, Mexico City (image: Alejandro Cartagena on Unsplash).

  • Britain as the spoils of empire
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Nadine El-Enany. My parents travelled from Egypt to Britain in 1977, moving from London to Exeter, a city in the South West of England, in 1978. For my parents, Exeter was a place they felt fortunate to have found, an idyll […]
  • Race and the making of migration regimes
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Radhika Mongia. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (2018) is an investigation into the history of state control over migration. At the heart of the book are two main questions: first, what histories can we chart […]
  • Intimate state encounters: Brexit, European Roma and contested home-lands
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Rachel Humphris. Brexit and the UK’s relationship with the European Union foregrounds questions of identity, nationhood and who is included or excluded. For those identified as ‘Roma’ these are perennial questions as purported ‘European citizenship’ made little difference to their position […]
  • Racism and the UK’s immigration system
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Maya Goodfellow. ‘Hard Brexit,’ Labour’s Andy Burnham warned a few months after the EU referendum result in 2016, would ‘turn Britain into a place it has never been: divided, hostile, narrow-minded.’ This is a theme that has persisted since the initial […]
  • The permanent ‘crisis’ of the borders of ‘Europe’
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Nicholas De Genova The borders of Europe seem to be the site of a protracted crisis. The fires that devastated the scandalously overcrowded Moria detention camp on 9 September 2020 on the Greek island of Lesvos, which summarily displaced upwards of […]
  • Deporting Black Britons: mobility and race-making in the life stories of criminalised ‘deportees’
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Luke de Noronha. My recently published book, Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (2020, Manchester University Press), traces the life stories of people who have been exiled from their homes in Britain. The four men who feature most […]
  • Moving difference: Brazilians in London
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Angelo Martins Junior. Portuguese version here. The freedom to move from place to place is a privilege in today’s world, and so ideas about human mobility and human difference are necessarily interwoven. When white people from the global north move […]
  • National sovereignty and postcolonial racism
    Race, nation and migration – the blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. By Nandita Sharma. A focus on migration, mobility and ideas of ‘race’ are crucial aspects of nationalist thought and practice. Indeed, today, racism operates through nationalism. Yet, while racism has been largely delegitimised, nationalism has not. The delegitimisation of racism does […]
  • MMB good reads on race, nation and migration
    A new blog series reframing thinking on movement and racism. Introduced by Julia O’Connell Davidson and Bridget Anderson. Not so long ago, many liberal thinkers in countries of the global north were comfortable narrating the story of liberal societies as a romance in which enlightened heroes gradually overcame the forces of barbarism. It was a […]