Podcast
The Migration Oxford podcast is created by Migration Oxford. Its aim is to bring together researchers and other observers to address the major migration issues of our time, both in UK and internationally, inform and influence public debate and policy considerations, and to connect with people who want to engage more deeply with issues of human movement. For more information see the Migration Oxford webpage.
For several decades, researchers based at the University of Oxford have been addressing one of the most compelling human stories; why and how people move. Combining the expertise of the Centre on Migration Policy and Society, the Refugee Studies Centre, Border Criminologies in the Department of Law, the Transport Studies Unit in the School of Geography and the Environment, and scholars working on migration and mobility from across divisions and departments, the University has one the largest concentrations of migration researchers in the world. We all come together at Migration Oxford.
In this episode we discuss the realities of immigration detention across Europe, from the individual experiencing detention to the broader politics shaping the system. What is immigration detention? The Migration Observatory explains in a recent policy briefing, ‘In the UK, immigration detention refers to the Home Office practice of detaining foreign nationals for the purposes of resolving their immigration statuses. Most countries use immigration detention. When people are detained, they are typically held in prison like conditions’.
But what does detention actually mean for those who experience it? And how do broader political forces shape the system?
Recorded earlier last year, we explore these important questions in our latest episode of the Migration Oxford podcast, and examine immigration detention through multiple lenses:
· The individual human experience: We hear from Gee Manoharan, Co-Director of Policy and Influencing at AVID (Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees), about his harrowing experience of detention in the UK.
· The importance of research: While Dr Andriani Fili, Wellcome Trust Research Fellow and Co-Director of Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford, highlights the importance of research in imagining more humane systems, drawing on the ‘Detention Landscapes’ programme of work, which investigates human rights violations inside detention facilities in Greece,
· The politics of immigration detention: Dr Lena Karamanidou, Head of Research at the Border Violence Monitoring Network, looks at the broader politics of immigration detention across Europe, and examines the prevalence violence in detention centres.
Together, we critique and analyse current systems, and imagine an alternative future – what does a better system look like and how could we get there?
The episode is co-hosted by Rob McNeil, Deputy Director of the Migration Observatory, and Delphine Boagey, Programme Officer at the Refugee-Led Research Hub and producer of the Migration Oxford podcast.