This research challenge explores how human movement can facilitate resilience and transformation. It takes a bottom-up view of the ways individuals and groups resist and transform political narratives on migration and mobility restrictions, examining successes and failures in achieving border justice. Active, constructive engagement with third sector organisations and policymakers is a key aspect of this challenge.
This challenge takes migrant experiences as its starting point. Rather than seeing migration as a problem in need of solutions, we seek to debunk the sedentary logic of Western political narratives and explore the ways in which this can be resisted and transformed in everyday life. Using a lens of mobility, and promoting innovative as well as critical approaches to policy alongside engagement with third sector organisations, this research challenge champions activist research and social justice more broadly.
Research challenge co-ordinator:
Dr Natasha Carver, Lecturer in International Criminology, School of Policy Studies
Selected research projects:
- New leadership programme supporting young refugees
- Kept Apart: Couples and families separated by the UK immigration system
- Diachronic Dor: Understanding the ancient city for the modern day
- Memorials to people who have died and to those missing during migration
- Borders and Borderlands: A research network on historical representations of border territories and communities (A UoB research network run by Professor Helen Fulton)
Previous
- Deportability and the family
- Queer Muslim Asylum
- Becoming Vulnerable: developing artistic practices of renaturalisation in contested wetland ecologies (AHRC SWW DTP Doctoral Research Project – Sage Brice)
- Who is worthy of ‘our’ support? An exploration of the causes, impact and possible alternatives to the relative entitlements associated with disability and forced migration in UK.
- Memorials to people who have died and to those missing during migration
- ETHOS – Toward an empirically informed theory of justice and fairness
‘BRASP: A Story of Resilience‘
MMB works with a number of organisations that support refugees and asylum seekers in Bristol. Several of these are part of the Bristol Refugee and Asylum Seeker Partnership (BRASP), which brought 16 organisations together in 2020 to face the challenges of the pandemic and ensure that their service users continued to receive the support they needed. This short film celebrates their extraordinary coordinated effort.