Month: March 2019

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Mobilising Global Voices: Perspectives from the Global South

Dr Sandip Hazareesingh and collaborators from the Indian NGO Green Foundation were invited to present the research findings of their GCRF project Changing Farming Lives in South India, Past and Present at a conference on Mobilising Global Voices: Perspectives from the Global South, held at the House of Commons on 27-28 February 2019. Read Dr Hazareesingh’s blog below:

This event was jointly organised by UKRI-AHRC and the International Development Committee (IDC) of UK Parliament. The conference brought together development scholars and NGOs from the Global South, UK-based researchers, and UK Parliamentarians. Its main objective was to share ideas about achieving greater visibility and inclusion of globally diverse voices and perspectives with a view to improving UK Government (DFID) policy-making.

The IDC’s main role is to scrutinise the work of DFID by providing information and perspectives from a wide range of sources so as to ensure that policies are compliant with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As much of the IDC’s current focus is on monitoring and evaluating DFID’s work in the areas of Forced Displacement and Climate Change, its members were given a unique opportunity to hear first-hand accounts of collaborative north-south research projects on these themes using Arts and Humanities approaches. These methodologies included oral history, story-telling, street theatre, participatory video, creative writing, used by projects researching subjects such as Local Community Experiences of Displacement from Syria; Traditional Knowledge and the Revival of Millets for a Changing Climate in South India; Living with Typhoons and Insecurity in the Philippines; Resilient Pastoralism in Mongolia and Kenya.

Members of both IDC and AHRC expressed great delight at the information and insights provided by the presentations and voiced the hope that this event heralds a continuing and inclusive dialogue between researchers in both north and south and their parliaments. However, many of the researchers present expressed scepticism about the effectiveness of such events in changing or improving government policies. Indeed, some invited delegates from the south had been refused visas to travel to the UK. Personally, I made the point, to loud applause from the floor, that unless the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy is reversed and visa applications from the south approached with a radically different mindset, ‘voices from the south’ will remain marginalised and hopes for a deepening north-south dialogue on development voiced by the conference organisers might well prove unsustainable.

Harvesting water in South India, Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin 1910. Image credit: British Library

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Terence McBride’s article on Scottishness and ‘Foreigners’

Associate Lecturer in History Dr. Terence McBride has published ‘Scottishness and “Foreigners”: the role of a developing Scottish  “machinery of government”  before 1939‘ , in the journal Historical Research. Before 1939 continental Europeans were settling in Scotland, in a part of the United Kingdom  that had been shaped by distinct religious and legal traditions.  Government bodies in Scotland that had emerged in the nineteenth century  also gained significant powers over welfare, public health and local government before that date. This article, as the foundation for a wider study on migrants in Scotland, uses government records to examine attempts by these bodies to engage with migrants and also to develop ideas on managing  ‘foreignness’. It concludes that although officials largely engaged on the basis of increasingly restrictive UK-wide immigration legislation from 1905, this was also a period in which migrants could benefit from the efforts of both ministers and mandarins to act in line with what they saw as the particular traditions, practices  and priorities of Scotland.