Campaigning and research networks

I am RAPAR’s Research and Evaluation Lead.

Established in 2001, RAPAR (Refugee and Asylum Participatory Action Research) is a human rights organisation based in Manchester, UK, primarily concerned with displaced people and issues relating to displaced people. I have been the Research Lead in RAPAR (pro bono) since 2015. RAPAR’s focus is on research, campaigning and community development for rights in the UK’s hostile environment.

RAPAR’s research centres on exploring any issue important and relevant to our members, by centring the people who are affected by it, throughout the research process. Through our research, we focus on the living experience of discrimination, human rights violations, and systemic oppression experienced by the vast majority of our members. We work with other community, charity, and third-sector organisations, in community development, in public spaces, and with policy-makers.

We utilise our research to develop public-facing awareness-raising campaigns and to agitate for critical social change for people who have been displaced (research-focused campaigning), and we conduct research ‘wrapped around’ campaigning work so that we are always ‘learning in action’ in our work (campaigning-focused research).

See some of the work conducted with RAPAR here: international and national projects.

I am GRIPP’s Research and Evaluation Lead.

GRIPP (Growing Rights Instead of Poverty Partnership) comprises several organisations and networks (Amnesty UK, Just Fair, ATD Fourth World, Poverty Truth Commission, Thrive Teeside, The Bevan Foundation, and RAPAR) working together to end poverty across the nations and regions of the UK. I have been the Research/ Evaluation Lead for GRIPP since 2024.

GRIPP holds that poverty is a human rights violation and that systemic poverty injustices must be challenged and ended on the basis of human rights. By bringing together lived/ing and learnt experiences of poverty and human rights, GRIPP aims to release knowledge and generate the power to drive real change by bringing people, groups and communities together, across the UK, to build a social movement.

I am on SNN’s Reference Group and continue to campaign for its central call: Status Now 4 All.

Recognising that the Covid-19 pandemic would have devastating impacts on the groups most marginalised in British and Irish society, RAPAR founded the Status Now 4 All Network (SNN) in March 2020 to call upon the British and Irish States to act immediately so that all undocumented, destitute and migrant people in the legal process in both the UK and Ireland are granted (indefinite leave to remain). Since its inception, SNN has become a growing coalition of 140+ organisations and community action groups all campaigning for #StatusNow4All undocumented migrants and migrants in legal process.

I have been a member of SSAHE since 2021 and contribute activity to its work. SSAHE runs bi-monthly webinars that are free for all to attend. 

Social Scientists Against The Hostile Environment (SSAHE) is a project of the British Sociological Association’s Special Interest Group on Refugees, Migration and Settlement, established by Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences. The network of social scientists (academics and community actors) focuses on issues of racism and migration in the UK and globally, and is committed to the ethics that it is our duty as social scientists to use our research to inform political debates and to challenge the ‘hostile environment’ for migrants produced by current government policy.

I am a co-founder of Feminist Spaces (2018-), a network that brings together feminist, anti-racist, embodied practices of resistance and arts activism to resignify space and to perform everyday acts of resistance with voice and action. Feminist Spaces aims to articulate some of the complexity and diversity of feminist spaces, to explore and record acts of resistance through occupying hostile environments, and to build a collaborative, capacity-releasing network by pairing up UK and European-based projects of resistance with a range of allied projects in less economically developed countries.

We recognise in Feminist Spaces that the spaces we occupy are not neutral, but are imbued with her/history and meaning. Certain bodies become socially entitled to take up space, while others are not. Some of us find ourselves within hostile environments where our presence is unwelcome and we are made to be out of place.

Feminist Spaces contributes to wide-reaching concerns, debates and activities on different intersections of identity and space, where positions of authority have become racialised and gendered. Safely existing in spaces, being heard and being visible, or wanting to remain undetected, staying in place or moving across spaces with lines and borders: these are acts of resistance in contexts of increasing barriers and hostilities towards those who are displaced and those who are made to be out of place.

(Image created by Candice Purwin, illustrator and writer.)