This ESRC Festival of Social Sciences event will comprise a co-delivered seminar and workshop to interrogate and challenge the ‘hostile environment’ that targets people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. It will draw upon co-research between the University of Huddersfield and RAPAR's young people seeking asylum that took place as part of the PARTISPACE project funded by H2020 (2016-2018) and explored young people’s participation in the hostile environment, as well as ongoing research on activism, campaigning and young people’s lives. It will consider transcultural ideas of space, place and borders, who ‘belongs’ and ‘others’, and explore what and how discourses of othering, central to the ‘hostile environment’, enforce and reinforce exclusion and difference in individuals’ everyday lived lives, and how people counteract these discourses through their own actions.

Welcoming academics, practitioners, the public, activists and advocates, the event will begin informally with refreshments and a screening of ‘Faceless’, a film written, produced, directed and performed by young people (aged 25-30) seeking asylum. A seminar talk describing ongoing participatory action research by and with young people seeking asylum will follow. Co-delivered by academics and community activists, the concluding workshop will explore participatory action research in the academy and community human rights activism to explore the question: How do the concepts of space, place and the ‘other’ materialise and what can we do, between us, to transform them?

The event will be co-delivered by the Centre for Citizenship, Conflict, Identity and Diversity, University of Huddersfield and RAPAR, a human rights organisation based in Manchester.

This event will run twice: Huddersfield (4th November 2019) and Manchester (7th November 2019), both 13.30 to 17.00.

• You are on the booking page for the Huddersfield event on the 4th November.
• If you would like to book for the Manchester event on the 7th November, please visit this booking page.

Hashtag: #ESRCFestival.

Image: Hostile Environment by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images (modified)