This report investigates the narrative construction of migrant irregularity in the United Kingdom across three primary domains: media, politics, and civil society. The research employs corpus analysis...

This report summarises findings from the February 2025 I-CLAIM survey of 1,147 UK adults, exploring public knowledge of irregular migration, how people define it, and their attitudes toward irregular ...

Looking past the bombastic electoral rhetoric, deportation campaigns face significant hurdles.

8 - 11 April 2025, Department of African Studies and Anthropology (DASA) at the University of Birmingham. Conference artwork by Letizia Bonanno

8 - 11 April 2025, Department of African Studies and Anthropology (DASA) at the University of Birmingham. Conference artwork by Letizia Bonanno

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the ‘experimental collaborations’ that guided the authors in designing and conducting a collaborative ethnography of the social and geographical mobilities of disadvantaged European youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter is based on 30 online video conversations between the two authors: an Italian white male postdoctoral researcher and a Romanian Roma woman who spent most of her youth homeless in Madrid. Together, they examine the practical and conceptual implications of collaborative methodologies involving individuals with diverse socioeconomic and experiential backgrounds. They do so by tracing the multiple origins, arrangements and meanings of their collaboration through a deeply reflexive dialogue that recovers and validates their situated memories, emotions and experiences as legitimate sources of ethnographic knowledge. The chapter particularly emphasizes the potential of digital technologies in reconfiguring the modes of ethnographic collaboration, shedding light on the positive role of uncertainty and failure in reducing power asymmetries within participatory research encounters.

Roma people in Europe still suffer from severe housing deprivation compared to the general population. Nevertheless, reducing Roma housing to loss and exclusion risks concealing the strategic and creative dimension of residential micro-practices enacted by Roma themselves, who instead mobilise various resources at national and transnational levels. Moving from these premises, this chapter captures the complexity of the literature on Roma housing by focusing on three main issues. First, it engages with critical scholarship deconstructing stereotyped understandings which commonly shape policy approaches and public opinion on Roma populations and mobility. Secondly, we focus on the different forms of housing segregation in Europe, with specific attention to the spatial device of the camp. Then, we turn to actor-centred perspectives, thoroughly discussing the transnational residential strategies and homemaking practices enacted by Roma migrants. In conclusion, we reflect on emerging avenues of academic and activist research foregrounding intersectionality through feminist perspectives and the nexus with housing rights movements.

The everyday lives of unaccompanied young people coming of age in Europe through co-produced music and comedy sketches