Addressing Goal 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure, Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities and Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, our publishing on migration examines conflict, insecurity, access to justice and how policy should pay attention to the needs of marginalised populations.
Key on our list is the Global Migration and Social Change series, which opens up interdisciplinary terrain and develops new scholarship in migration and refugee studies that is innovative, empirically rich and policy engaged.
Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Migration, mobilities and movement, we aim to address the following goals:
Migration, Mobilities and Movement
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Introduction:
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is an important global health issue linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Adolescents in refugee settings face specific SRH needs and risks, and limited access to needed services. This research, therefore, aimed to develop an understanding of SRH needs of, and risks to, adolescent refugees, to inform adolescent sexual and reproductive health policies and programmes.
Methodology:
The study employed qualitative approaches. Seventeen in-depth interviews were conducted with adolescent refugees and nine key informant interviews with stakeholders, including representatives from NGOs, health facility workers and refugee leaders. We performed content and thematic analysis drawing on the ecological systems theory framework.
Findings:
Reproductive health issues presented by adolescent refugees included menstruation supplies, reproductive health education and contraception. Participants reported several reproductive health risk factors that include risky sexual relationships, child abuse in homes, early marriage, teenage pregnancies and forced marriage, and sexual and gender-based violence.
Conclusion:
The findings highlight significant gaps in adolescent refugees’ knowledge and access to SRH services. These gaps are shaped by cultural norms, limited service availability, and lack of targeted SRH education for young people in refugee settings.
Recommendation:
Targeted training is vital to guaranteeing efficient delivery of SRH services; with humanitarian organisations ensuring their personnel is appropriately trained to support adolescent refugees and their SRH needs. Culturally appropriate services are required to ensure greater buy-in and build trusting relationships with the population.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
When policy makers look at a problem and seek to devise solutions, they cannot help reaching back into the past. In the case of migration, the history that is commonly referenced is the wave of migration from the former colonies that took place in the period 1950–70. Nonetheless, if we want to understand the rules that govern migration, the regulatory infrastructure and our conceptual frameworks informing the regulatory design of the system, we need to cast our minds back to an earlier period. The Aliens Order 1920, an Order in Council promulgated under the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, was a particularly important legal intervention in British immigration law. The Aliens Order sought to achieve many objectives, but most crucially it required any ‘alien’ (non-subject) coming to the UK with the intention of seeking employment to produce a permit issued to the employer by the Ministry of Labour. The work permit was one of the earliest attempts at aligning immigration with labour market policy, and linking the two has had a profound impact on the way that immigration has been thought about, rationalized and regulated ever since.
While the ‘migrant’ identity is unstable and ill-defined, it is often, together with its companion terms ‘refugee’ and ‘asylum seeker’, a focus for transnational and international organizing. Migrants are themselves, and can facilitate, living connections with social, political and economic politics across borders. What this means in practice is explored in this interview with Brid Brennan. Brennan coordinates the Corporate Power Project at the Transnational Institute and describes herself as an activist scholar. She has a long history of organizing with international social movements, including with migrant workers across Europe.
Political discourse on migration is fundamentally nation-building: its purpose is to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, to prescribe who belongs and who does not. This chapter unpicks and analyses the ‘epistemic borderwork’ in eight speeches on migration policy given by the most powerful politicians in the UK between July 2021 and March 2023, a time of significant legislative and policy reform on immigration, including the introduction and enactment of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023 as well as the Rwanda Partnership and the Homes for Ukraine policies. All the speeches dehumanize migrant Others, constructing them as undeserving and exploitative, but three of the five speakers are people of colour and thus subject to racialization and racism themselves, which affects their discourse. We make visible and analyse the relationship between the state-imposed category of ‘illegal migrant’ and the embodied – racialized – characteristics of political leaders.
This chapter examines interconnections between animal and policy mobilities by looking at the materialities these mobilities depend on and facilitate. It traces the UK/European Union development of cow passports to show how materialities make diseases, food safety, public health and market operationality governable in practice. The chapter then looks at the control of antimicrobial resistance to illustrate the material limitations of policy mobilities, and it concludes with some remarks about policy mobilities and time.
This chapter examines the more-than-human agencies that shaped the early voyages of England’s East India Company and the experiences of those who were involved in them (in part or in whole, willingly or unwillingly). How did things like ocean currents, pepper, books, rats and shipworm support or undermine these ventures, it asks, and how might attending to such things affect our understanding of these voyages? Drawing on work in new materialism, the chapter reflects in particular on how seafarers’ dependence on – and vulnerabilities to – more-than-human agencies might relate to early modern notions of heroic travel. These reflections lead to some concluding remarks on the potential for synergy between ecomaterialism and mobility studies.
Films portraying migrant and refugee experiences are commonly viewed as opposing, rather than contributing to, anti-migrant racist discourse. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated film Persepolis (2007), which chronicles Satrapi’s life during the Iranian revolution, her migration to Vienna, her return to Iran and her eventual residency in France, is widely celebrated for its complex portrayal of the Iranian migrant experience. This chapter problematizes the film’s representation of migrants by examining its construction of racial and cultural identities. Persepolis’ narrative pivots on the Satrapi family home as an enclosed, secular, middle-class idyll that starkly contrasts with the turmoil of the Islamic revolution and migration. Essentialized Muslim characters emerge as hostile outsiders to the security of the idyll, where the Satrapi family share a similitude with a racialized French/Western subjectivity and cultural superiority over lower social classes. These representational strategies, the chapter argues, fuses Iranian ‘dislocative nationalism’, an ideological current that seeks to dislodge Iran geographically and historically from the Middle East and Islam, with French neo-republican discourse on ‘good’ citizenship, which excludes Muslim and Arab migrant populations in Europe. The chapter seeks to raise questions, therefore, over the film’s widely claimed universality and to draw attention to the broader problem of the terms through which a depoliticized and uncritical celebration of self-representation in migrant cinema is made.
