Today we are launching the first episode of IRiS new Zoomcast series on mobility and immobility. “Conversations with Iris” will be a space where we will be in dialogue with fellow researchers, teachers, writers, migrants, refugees, activists, community organisers, artists and policy makers on issues related to the current pandemic and much more. It is a Zoomcast series (nothing like Zoom captures the Zeitgeist of this time we are living in), a conversation where our interlocutors will share and discuss ideas, insights and experiences from different standpoints and perspectives. We hope you enjoy this first conversation with our colleague Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, and Les Back, professor of sociology at Goldsmiths and recently co-author of Migrant City (Routledge 2018). In the next episode our colleague Dawn River talks to refugee and LGBTIQ activist Espoir Njei.
The Age of Superdiversity 
Reblogged this on Postcards from … and commented:
Really exciting to open our new Zoomcast series with Lyndsey Stonebridge and Les Back. Part 2 of the conversation will be available soon.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful conversation. Ever since the lockdown started I have been thinking about the way Les Back and Shamser Sinha talk about the experience of waiting and dead time that characterises so many migrants’ lives – here in the UK, in refugee camps elsewhere. And now we are all getting a small taste of this but most of us have lives to “go back to”, and with the work I do I have seen that for some migrants who had finally built up a “life” here, this situation has thrown them back into precarity and possibly another lengthy period of waiting to resume living.