Speakers: Kathryn Medien, Dan Taylor
Chair: Liudmila Nikanorova

In this roundtable, Dan Taylor, Kathryn Medien and Anita Grodkievicz of the Rosmini Centre, Wisbech discuss recent projects exploring how migrants in the UK are experiencing and responding to the UK’s “hostile environment” policies. Over the last year, Dan has been undertaking an Open Societal Challenges project exploring borders, community and connection in the Fens, a part of England which produces much of the UK’s food, much of it through lowwaged farm and factory work that has become systematically reliant on migrant labour, some of it trafficked. Anita Grodkievicz and her organisation the Rosmini Centre have worked tirelessly supporting migrants in one Fens market town, Wisbech. We hear from her past and present work supporting migrants in the area, from investigations into people trafficking to labour conditions for migrant workers postBrexit. For some years Kathryn has analysed the historical development of and resistance to a “hostile environment” in the UK towards migrants and racialised Britons. Drawing on archival work and contemporary fieldwork, Kathryn explores how activists framed their resistance to the hostile environment through identifying connections between internal bordering and the ongoing legacies of the British Empire and colonialism. Such a framing illuminates the intimacies between bordering policies in Britain and elsewhere, allowing us to create solidarities between antiborder and antiracist struggles globally.