Samir was 13 years old when I first met him. He had arrived in the UK from Afghanistan some years earlier. He was reluctant to talk in class about his home language, as some of the other pupils would call him a ‘terrorist’, so he kept that side of his life hidden.
It’s difficult to imagine British musical life without the contributions of migrating musicians and the music they bring with them. In the realm of western art music, the works of the Halle-born George Frideric Handel are closely bound up with British public life.
On the 17th August 2015, Abdul Haroun, a Sudanese refugee, walked the 31-mile Channel tunnel to Britain with a hope of reaching safety in the UK. Artist and artist film maker Alia Syed read the news reports of Abdul Haroun walking through the Channel Tunnel and was astonished that somebody could survive walking through the tunnel. Inspired by Mr Haroun’s case, Alia Syed filmed herself crossing the London Rotherhithe tunnel by foot.
Dr Belinda Wu , Research Fellow in Development Policy and Planning at the Open University and Dr Gareth Bentley, Senior Teaching Fellow in media at SOAS, are organising a paper panel at the Development Studies Association (DSA) conference 2018 on Global inequalities.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that racialised researchers and public figures find themselves in an ambivalent position when the issue of migration suddenly becomes topical. Everyone wants to hear their views and attributes the perspectives they offer to their racialised bodies and experiential knowledge rather than to their professional expertise.
The Open University has been awarded £50,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the new Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) initiative to research the responses of small and marginal farmers in South India to food security, biodiversity, and climate challenges.
The Software Engineering and Design (SEAD) research group in the OU’s School of Computing and Communications has been awarded a prestigious five year Platform Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.