BtH1 E4 Beyond the headlines … with Alison Phipps and Tawona Sithole

Who do we think we are?

In June 2022, the headlines in the UK were full of news about the Rwanda plan. As an ECHR ruling halted the first deportation flight scheduled to depart from Rwanda, from the Prince of Wales to the Archbishop of Canterbury it was the high-profile opponents of the scheme to offshore the UK’s responsibilities to those seeking asylum that caught the attention of the press. But this public outpouring of resistance to bordering did not emerge from nowhere. It sits on years of resistance and protest from the grassroots and within local communities. Professor Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, and Tawona Sitholé (AKA Ganyamatope), Poet-in-Residence for the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network join Michaela and Ala to go beyond the headlines to look into the roles of local communities in resistance to bordering. Taking local community action in Glasgow as a starting point, they explore everyday acts of resistance, the connections between solidarities movements around the UK, and the political potential of poetry and storytelling.

You can access the full transcripts for each episode over on the Rebordering Britain and Britons after Brexit website.

In this episode we cover …

1 The Rwanda Deportation Scheme

2 Glasgow and the Kenmure Street Protests

3 Migrant solidarity across the UK

Quote

[I]t isn't the stopping of the Rwanda flight that led to the publication of the Bill of Rights … that bill should have been unthinkable. And it has been thinkable because vested interests wish to see the removal of human rights from large swathes of the population, in the interests of vested in offshored capital, and outsourcing as a way of thinking about human beings and human beings not as human beings, but as human capital.

— Alison Phipps

Where can you find out more about the topics in today’s episode?

Our headline ‘Monarchy, celebrity and clergy’ was published in The Guardian, 14 June 2022

Alison Phipps is on Twitter at The University of Glasgow. Read her thoughts on the Rwanda Plain in this blogpost “The border is a Colonial Wound: The Rwanda Deal and State Trafficking in People” You can also hear more from her here The Tories’ Rwanda plans have failed – what now?

Tawona Sitholé (AKA Ganyamatope) is on Twitter or at Glasgow Refugee, asylum and migrant network. Find more of his work at seeds of thought.

The poems performed in the episode are words and Border crossing in Togo

To learn more about activism in Glasgow we recommend, this article on ‘The festival of resistance’ a year on from Kenmure Street protests, this article on the protests against the Rwanda plans and this blog on the Glasgow girls and Roza Salih’s journey to becoming a candidate for the Scottish Parliament election.

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