The Open University has been awarded £50,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the new Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) initiative to research the responses of small and marginal farmers in South India to food security, biodiversity, and climate challenges.
The Software Engineering and Design (SEAD) research group in the OU’s School of Computing and Communications has been awarded a prestigious five year Platform Grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Lesvos Island, May 2017. From where I am standing I can see the Turkish coast. During the night one can also see the lights on the other side of the Greek-Turkish border. The other side.
Between 2008 and 2015, I was working as a human rights lawyer in various refugee detention centres in Greece. Due to the fact that the Greek state was not providing any legal aid for detained asylum seekers the burden of the provision of free legal aid was on very few NGOs.
OU academic Victoria Canning’s recently published book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System draws together analyses of policy with domestic and international legislation relating to refugee status and torture, alongside the lived experience of women seeking asylum.
At a time when Brexit negotiations reveal the potential confusion of assuming a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach across Europe, an OU academic described the perils of this approach worldwide.
In February’s theme, “Open To Places”, I would like to highlight a hidden place that most people do not tend to see or speak about in their everyday lives: A British immigration detention centre.