A Walk in Hackney

A Walk in Hackney: Migration, Memory, and Feminist Urban Futures

Tuesday, 19 May 2026 | 15:30 (followed by an early dinner)

We will meet at Dalston Square, the closest station is Dalston Junction Station)

This 1.5-hour walking seminar approaches Hackney as a living archive shaped by successive histories of migration, labour, and collective struggle. Moving through key sites in Dalston and Ridley Road, and on to Simpson House, a significant node in Hackney’s garment and community infrastructures, we will trace how migrants from across the world, and across different historical periods, have materially and culturally produced the borough through work, music, street art, food economies, activism, and practices of care.

Organised around five interrelated themes, Memory, Labour, Resistance, Belonging, and Feminist Futures, the walk draws on feminist and decolonial methodologies that treat walking as a situated mode of inquiry. Rather than approaching the city as a neutral backdrop, we will examine how built environments sediment layered histories of displacement and organising, how gentrification reconfigures urban belonging, and how everyday infrastructures of care persist within contested urban space.

The walk will conclude with an informal gathering at a Turkish/Kurdish restaurant, offering space to continue conversations over shared food and convivial exchange.

The walk is facilitated by Dr. Feride Kumbasar, Borderlines Resident Fellow, feminist migration scholar, and community researcher. Feride’s work bridges academia, activism, and creative practice, investigating intersections of migration, gender, labour, and urban change through participatory and decolonial methodologies such as oral history, go-along interviews, and community mapping. Her forthcoming monograph, part of Manchester University Press’s Women on the Move series, examines counter-cartographies of migrant women’s agency, while her collaborative projects foreground feminist approaches to belonging, care, and spatial justice.

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