In this seminar you will learn what the 'hostile environment' policy agenda is and what impact the hostile environment has on individuals, communities, and society as a whole. I will explain why critics have suggested that the 'hostile environment' is racist, and how we can understand this particular policy agenda in the broader historical context of British colonialism.

SPEAKERS:

Lucy Mayblin, University of Sheffield

Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on asylum, human rights, policy-making, and the legacies of colonialism. She is the author of Asylum After Empire: Postcolonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (2017) which won the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize in 2018, Impoverishment and Asylum: Social Policy as Slow Violence (2019), and Migration Studies and Colonialism (with Joe Turner, 2020).  

* This event is part of the Stand Up! Speak Out! Solidarity Knows No Borders Training Series: A Toolkit to Resist the Hostile Environment *