In 2017, the Iranian-Kurdish writer, Behrouz Boochani, published an extraordinary book, “No Friend But the Mountains” which documented his life imprisoned in the Australian-run immigration detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Combining political theory, myth, poetry, memoir, the book rises to the challenge of resisting oppression by creating a new literary form of knowledge. Written using phone text messaging, the text was also a work of interdisciplinary translation, collaboration, and imagination.

In this episode Lyndsey Stonebridge talks with the political philosopher, Omid Tofighian, Boochani’s translator and collaborator. They examine how contemporary migration regimes can be described as an interlocking ‘Kyriarchal’ systems of domination and explore how creative writing can lead to new understandings of injustice and human rights. This is the reference to Itamar’s letter about Boochani mentioned in the video.

In this episode, IRiS Director Professor Nando Sigona talks to Dr Alan Gamlen, Associate Professor of Geography at Monash University, Australia, founding editor-in-chief of the journal Migration Studies (OUP) and co-editor of the “Global Migration and Social Change” book series for Bristol University Press. Inspired by Alan Gamlen’s recent COMPAS Working Paper on migration and the pandemic, this conversation speculates on the impact of the pandemic on migration flows and governance and what we can expect for the future.

Dawn River, academic at IRiS talks to Dr Rubina Jasani, Programme Director for Global Health at The Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute in Manchester. Rubina has an interest in exploring people’s lived experience of violence, displacement and identities; gender and sexuality; and suffering and healing. As a founding member of ‘No Recourse! Peer Research Project’ in partnership with WAST (Women Asylum Seekers Together, Manchester) and serving on the Board of Directors of Safety4Sisters, Rubina has been committed, through the co-creation of knowledge, to challenging stereotypes, raising awareness and campaigning for fundamental rights for refugees and asylum seekers. Informed by her academic and political work and, in her own words, ‘the experience of being a brown Indian woman’, Rubina speaks about the impact Covid-19 is having on the lives of activists and refugee and migrant women in the UK.

Melash Zeleke is from Ethiopia and is a not sighted asylum seeker currently living in a reception centre in Rome, Italy. He tells Natasha Nicholls and Annavittoria Sarli (IRiS) about his story and his life.

In this episode, Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, talks to Daniel Trilling, former editor of the New Humanist, journalist and author of Lights in the Distance. Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe (2018) and Bloody Nasty People. The Rise of Britain’s Far Right (2012).

This conversation between Espoir Njei and Dawn River took place one month into the coronavirus lockdown. They built a friendship through their shared commitment to supporting LGBTIQ migrants fleeing persecution. Espoir is a lesbian asylum seeker from the Cameroon currently in lockdown in Birmingham and Dawn is a queer academic at the University of Birmingham currently in lockdown in Germany.

Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, dialogues with Les Back, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and recently co-author of “Migrant City” (Routledge 2018).