I am a border-abolitionist and critical utopian activist and I have been a researcher, community organiser and creative practitioner in the migrant justice sector for many years. I am currently doing a PhD at Birkbeck University London (2020-2027), exploring the everyday resistance practices of migrant women with precarious immigration status (read more). In my work I am applying feminist, decolonial theories alongside participatory, creative, music and arts-based methodologies to collectively re-imagine beyond Europe’s contemporary deadly border regimes.
Migrant organising
I have organised alongside diverse migrant, refugee communities in London and Athens. Most recently I worked as community engagement manager at the South London Refugee Association (2019-2023). In the past years, I have centred both my work and research around the issue of state-enforced destitution through ‘No Recourse to Public Funds‘ (NRPF) in the UK, meaning the exclusion from any form of state benefits based on a person’s immigration status (read more). The slow and often invisible violence of NRPF is only one example of deep-seated classed, gendered and racialised hierarchies of who Europe welcomes as ‘good refugee’ versus ‘economic migrant’. My work seeks to challenge such harmful legal and moral narratives of deservedness within the context of immigration and welfare states and apply a critical anti-racist and border-abolitionist lens.
Creative practice & facilitation
I enjoy collaborative approaches and combining a range of creative and trans-disciplinary practices. I am borrowing from feminist, decolonial, and indigenous methodologies and ethics to think about how we can counter the harmful, extractvist legacy of Western academia. My community organising training with Citizens UK has helped me to realise projects that are less hierarchical, foster community leadership and meaningful collaboration. In my academic thinking and writing, I am applying Black feminist epistemology, which values lived experience, dialogue, process, and embodied ways of knowing within knowledge-production. In my work as facilitator with groups, I am using arts-based and co-creative methods as means of collective storytelling, such as working with sound, natural material, visual practices, and zine-making (read more).
Music & Singing
As a singer, I specialise in Bulgarian choir arrangements and Eastern European folklore, which I have learned since my childhood from my mother. Teaching a yearly Bulgarian choir workshop at the Sommer Musik Fest, an international folklore festival in Germany, I continue to share this intergenerational connection through singing and harmonies with the international Bulgarian singing group Trio Mamajka. Consisting of a mother, daughter and early childhood friend, Trio Mamajka is singing songs taught from one generation to the next, at home, around the kitchen table, songs by mothers and daughters. I also write my own songs and love experimenting with different traditional folk music, instrumental fusion, looping and other intuitive voice techniques.
