Honorary Doctor’s Lecture: Everyday kindness as resistance to the cruelty of immigration regimes

In this lecture, Professor Jenny Phillimore examines kindness in the context of forced migration and sexual and gender-based violence. In particular, she focuses on acts of kindness by strangers, as experienced by forced migrants SGBV survivors during their journey and settlement. She investigates the potential that such acts hold to rupture the continuum of violence and the dominant heteropatriarchal relations, and to foster radical hope, enabling in this way survivors to continue their journeys. Professor Phillimore argues that both banal and extraordinary acts of kindness are (micro)political. They result in connections between people from across social and political cleavages, and they function as resistance to the cruelty of immigration, border and asylum systems and the degrading practices embedded within them.

Jenny Phillimore is Professor of Migration and Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham. She was founder Director of the Institute for Research into Superdiversity. Her work spans refugee integration, superdiversity and access to welfare and sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) and forced migration funded by organisations including the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, The European Commission and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. She leads the SEREDA research program (Sexual and gender based violence in the refugee emergency: from displacement to arrival) focusing on the relationship between SGBV and integration, shame, stigma and the experiences of SGBV survivors. She is a recipient of a Leverhulme Major Award developing the concept of violent disintegration and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg where she collaborates with Prof Gabriella Elgenius on civil society, integration and superdiversity in the Localities and Rethinking Integration projects funded by Forte and the Swedish Research Council (VR).

This event is co-organized by the Department of Sociology and Work Science and the Faculty of Social Sciences.