THURSDAY 28 JANUARY – 6:30pm-8:30pm
Online Meeting
ACTIVISTS
Benjamin Morgan, Public Interest Law Centre. PILC exists to challenge injustice through legal representation, strategic litigation, research and legal education. In 2017, PILC worked with North East London Migrant Action (Nelma) to bring a successful case against data sharing between homelessness charities and Immigration enforcement towards the removal of migrant rough sleepers. PILC is currently preparing a legal challenge to the new Immigration Rule that makes rough sleeping itself grounds for removal.
The No Evictions Network started in Summer 2018 to organise neighbourhoods in Glasgow against the mass eviction of asylum seekers from SERCO-run accommodation across the city. The campaign culminated in Serco losing their contract in Scotland, but being replaced by a new company: Mears. Throughout the lockdown this year the Network supported people evicted from asylum accommodation and rehoused, or detained, in hotels – whilst also campaigning against the horrendous conditions people faced.
The OUR HOMES Renters Research Project is a Participatory Action Research Project started by the Hackney Branch of the London Renters Union. In summer 2019, a group of renters were employed by the union to research their own and their wider community’s housing situations. Together they collectively made a film “Hostile Housing” which asks what the problems are, who is responsible and what we need to do to make change.
HISTORIANS
Amy Grant is a PhD candidate at University of East Anglia. Amy researches the state, racism, hate and the church in late 20th century Britain, through the lens of squatting, sanctuary campaigns and anti-deportation resistance between the 1970s and 1990s.
Dr Becky Taylor is a historian who is centrally concerned with the relationship between the different levels of the state and marginal and minority groups. Her areas of research and writing have taken in histories of Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, ‘immigrants’, those living in poverty, and most recently, refugees. She is currently writing a book for Cambridge University Press called The Britain they Entered: Refugees to Britain in the Twentieth Century. Her understanding of the state is also informed by over two decades of involvement in direct action as part of various grass-roots environmental, peace and social justice movements.