• Third sector organisations: An oasis for asylum seekers and refugees in the wake of Covid-19?

    Negative discourses around migration have created a hostile environment for asylum seekers and refugees. Having often had horrific and unimaginable experiences in their home country – and endured dangerous passage to claim asylum, refugees need places to feel accepted, recognised, to heal, reconcile in their host communities and to share their experiences of daily life…

  • COVID-19, (im)mobility and Health Inequalities

    COVID-19 has had a huge impact on human mobility and migration. Governments across the world took extraordinary measures to curtail international travel and movement of peoples whilst simultaneously calling all their citizens to return home. Domestic systems of disease management followed including enforced quarantine and closed borders. The pandemic was initially thought as an equalizer;…

  • Windrush as Watershed? Revisiting migration policy and practice in the UK

    In the volatile COVID-19 era, the shift of the UK government away from the ‘hostile environment’ may come as a surprise to some. Priti Patel’s statement on the 21st July 2020 on a more compassionate ‘people, not cases’ approach to immigration in the wake of the Windrush scandal contrasts sharply with Brexit and its aggressive…

  • Coronavirus and Calais refugees: How can you stay safe without soap?

    France has been in lockdown since 16 March with strict rules limiting movement outside homes but what does this mean if you haven’t actually got a home? There are around 1200 refugees living rough in the pas-de-Calais region. They are in constant fear about their health and supplies of food and water as COVID-19 takes…

  • RefuAid seminar results in action for refugees

    Organised by the Action for Refugees working group, and supported by I4P, the RefuAid seminar held at Edge Hill University’s Ormskirk campus on 20 March had delegates enthralled by the presentations, not least by the moving testimony given by former client Naima, who told us about her former life in Libya and the role played…

  • Dr Julia Hope: Children’s Literature about Refugees

    Visiting from Goldsmiths’ University, last week Dr Julia Hope shared her wealth of experience from her PhD research and a decade as a ‘refugee teacher’, working with children from a refugee background in the classroom.  Sponsored by 4P this event took place on the 14th May. Her paper explored the range of ways in which…

  • Action for Refugees Research Group

    Following visits to the Calais “Jungle” by Mike Stoddart, Martin Ford and Umit Yildiz in 2016, Action for Refugees was established to coordinate the work of faculty staff on this important social justice issue. In July 2017, I4P and the Faculty of Education supported a one day conference that brought together academics, activists and members of refugee communities to…