Seminar Series: Resisting the Hostile Environment

This online lecture series ran from November 2023 to June 2024. It explored how the UK’s “hostile environment” immigration policy, first articulated by then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012, has been enforced, negotiated and resisted across different sites of everyday life. From media and film to health care, law, and higher education, the talks examined how borders and bordering practices shape experiences of citizenship and belonging, and how people and institutions challenge them.

Creating ‘Illegal’ Immigrants: The Rwanda Plan

Speaker: Daniel Trilling
Date: 9 November 2023

British governments have repeatedly promised to crack down on forms of immigration deemed unwanted. These measures frequently involve expanding the ways in which the state can classify people as “illegal”. Journalist Daniel Trilling examined what the government’s plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda reveals about the underlying logic of such policies and their persistence across party lines.

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The Migrant Archive: Chronicling Religious and Spiritual Experiences during the Pandemic (2020–23)

Speaker: Marie Gillespie
Date: 23 November 2023

Marie Gillespie presented Covid Chronicles from the Margins, a participatory digital archive created with asylum seekers, refugees and community partners during the pandemic. The project documented migrant experiences through creative smartphone storytelling, revealing both the deepening inequalities of the hostile environment and the emergence of new solidarities, spiritual connections and transnational networks of care and resistance.

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Unsettling Resettlement: The Representation of Refugee Homemaking in Remi Weekes’s His House (2020)

Speaker: Alisha Mathers
Date: 7 December 2023

Drawing on Avery F. Gordon’s theory of haunting, Alisha Mathers explored how the film His House visualises refugee trauma and resettlement in the UK. She argued that the film’s domestic setting becomes a haunted space that exposes the psychic and political costs of displacement, urging audiences to confront the “something-to-be-done” that haunts the nation’s asylum system.

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The Rwanda Case: Resistance and Counter-Resistance

Speaker: Kate Ritchie
Date: 18 January 2024

Kate Ritchie examined legal and political struggles surrounding the UK Government’s Rwanda asylum policy. Tracing the case through the domestic courts - from the High Court to the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court - she analysed how contestation between politicians, lawyers, academics and the media has shaped this landmark moment in migration law.

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Everyday Borders, ACAB Everyday

Speaker: Leah Cowan
Date: 8 February 2024

Author and activist Leah Cowan reflected on the racial capitalist basis of the border regime and its everyday enactments of violence. Linking empire, race, criminalisation and migration, she offered a radical critique of the ways borders extend into daily life.

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The Hostile Environment as Greek Tragedy

Speaker: Kamila Shamsie
Date: 15 February 2024

Novelist Kamila Shamsie read from her book Home Fire and discussed how literature can illuminate the moral and emotional dimensions of the hostile environment. The talk considered tragedy as a framework for understanding complicity, loyalty and resistance in contemporary Britain.

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NHS Apartheid: Resisting Migrant Passport Checks and Healthcare Charges within the NHS

Speaker: Kathryn Medien
Date: 14 March 2024

Kathryn Medien examined the introduction of passport checks and healthcare charges within the NHS and their historical lineage from 1982 to the present. Drawing on archival research and interviews, she showed how activists and healthcare workers have resisted these internal borders by framing them as continuations of colonial and racist practices - and by connecting domestic struggles to global movements for health justice.

Hostile Archives, Resistant Documentality: Rethinking the Windrush Scandal

Speaker: Henghameh Saroukhani
Date: 25 April 2024

Using Maurizio Ferraris’s theory of documentality, Henghameh Saroukhani reinterpreted government memos and telegrams surrounding the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. She argued that these documents reveal a bureaucratic machinery of imperial domination while also forming an archive of resistance - one that exposes and contests the long history of Britain’s hostile environment.

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Perceptions of Control and Criminalisation among Maritime Search and Rescue Workers in Europe

Speaker: Neil Graffin
Date: 2 May 2024

Based on interviews with search and rescue volunteers working in the Mediterranean, Neil Graffin examined how state authorities use legal, bureaucratic and rhetorical tools to control, deter and delegitimise humanitarian efforts at sea. The talk highlighted how volunteers experience these pressures as part of a wider pattern of criminalising compassion.

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Resisting Hostility: The Strive to Become a Sanctuary University

Speaker: Koula Charitonos
Date: 20 June 2024

Koula Charitonos discussed the movement to create sanctuary universities in the UK and beyond, focusing on initiatives that support refugee inclusion in higher education.

Refugee Inclusion in Higher Education in Uganda: Discourses, Digital Technologies and Complexity

Speakers: Michael Gallagher and Sandra Nanyunja
Date: 20 June 2024

Michael Gallagher and Sandra Nanyunja explored refugee inclusion in Ugandan higher education through a case study of the Refugee Law Project. Their talk examined how digital technologies, institutional policies and community networks shape educational opportunities for displaced people.