In February 2025, I had the pleasure to work together with artist and friend Rachel Margetts and some of my long-time comrades and migrant activists, Amanda, Faiza, and Mary, to creatively present some of our research findings in the form of a creative performance at the LIMINAL Lab’s 2-day ‘Lexicon II – Hostility and Infrastructures of Care’ event, hosted by Turf Projects in Croydon, London. LIMINAL is an international and interdisciplinary laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities and border violence, based in the University of Bologna’s Department of the Arts.
Photographs of the event are by Caleb Pinnell from Turf Projects Croydon
Listening to the sounds and voices of the slow, everyday violence of the UK’s Hostile Environment, ‘all our lines are busy’, trying to block the endless holes in a leaking basket, ‘you made yourself intentionally homeless’. Learning from the scattered seeds, small and thin, they fly with the wind and don’t decide their fate, or the snail that leaves their shell behind for other insects to make it their home, in a quiet, generous gesture.
This creative intervention was an attempt to experiment with alternative story-telling in order to share some of the ‘findings’ of my doctoral research in a more collective and creative way. Supposedly ‘academic’ concepts around migration are interwoven with poetic conversations and stories sharing lived experiences of surviving and resisting the UK’s hostile environment from within its cracks. These are shared alongside music, and sound recordings and quotes gathered during a creative research residential I organised as part of my doctoral research with a group of London-based migrant women activists, three of whom – Amanda, Faiza, and Mary – joined the Liminal Lab intervention as storytellers and creative collaborators.
The creative conceptualisation of the intervention emerged through a collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Rachel Margetts. We started conversations around our shared committed to exploring artistic and academic practices that use different creative media to craft more collaborative and ‘care-full’ forms of storytelling and research with communities targeted by hostile migration and welfare regimes. The resulting intervention playfully blurs the boundaries between academia, activism, and arts, and is thought of as an invitation to re-imagine and expand the formats and voices represented at academic conferences, and how stories and knowledges are disseminated and shared within and beyond academic settings.
Listen to the live recording and Q&A following our collective creative intervention at the LIMINAl Lab event.
Feature in European Alternative Journal
In October 2025, our intervention has been featured in an issue of the ‘European Alternative‘ Journal. The EA journal shares diverse contributions in a range of formats around ‘democracy, equality, and culture beyond the nation state‘. You can download the issue ‘Margins on Fire’ featuring our work here: EA Journal – Margins on Fire.
Screenshot of our article in the EA Journal. Print versions of the European Alternatives journal issues are available to download in English in French, beautifully designed by Luca Pantorno.
“The margins are not silent. They disrupt. They speak. They communicate across many languages. We write from here, from the contested edges of Europe. From a place where women, queer individuals, exiled voices, racialised lives, and precarious existences refuse to be sidelined. We are not seeking inclusion into the political spaces of yesterday; we are already establishing alternative spaces of belonging.” (From: Introduction to ‘Margins on Fire’, European Alternatives Journal, Issue 11, October 2025)