Discussing Decolonisation 2025/26 Summer Finale - Part 2
About this Event
Join staff and students in York for an afternoon of talks, workshops, discussions and community organising around border abolition and migrant justice in theory and in praxis.
The event schedule is as follows:
12.00-12.15: Registrations and opening remarks from series co-conveners
12.15-1.30: Keynote talk and Q&A with Dr Joe Turner (more info below)
1.30-2.15: Discounted food from Yahala Mataam, refugee-led pop-up restaurant in York
2.15-4.15: Mini workshops on border abolition and imagining futures, including banner-making and other activities
4.15-4.30: Comfort break
4.30-6.00: Plenary panel discussion with local community organisers and scholar-activists
This event follows on from our 2025/26 summer finale event, which was held online on Friday 26th June.
This time, we will come together in person to discuss, learn, organise and contribute to ongoing efforts to build solidarity and resistance in the face of escalating anti-migrant racism and the UK's increasingly hostile and violent border regime.
The event is free and open to anyone to attend, as part of the ongoing public Discussing Decolonisation series at York St John University. If you would like to receive updates about forthcoming events in the series, please sign up to our mailing list.
If you have any questions about the event itself, please email co-conveners Lucy Potter ([email protected]) and/or Laura Key ([email protected]).
Keynote: Channel Crossings: Small Boats, Anti-Migrant Racism and Empire’s Aftermath
Joe Turner, University of York
The ‘small boat’ crisis in the English Channel has been manufactured into a political spectacle by the British ruling class. Since 2018, the furore over this movement of so called ‘illegal migrants’ has redefined the landscape of British politics. Not only have government responses to people moving to claim asylum become a vector for the mobilisation of the far right and outright fascism on Britian’s streets, but this has further normalised technocratic forms of border violence in the Channel and beyond. This talk aims to place the small boats crisis in it’s appropriate historical and social context. It explores the historical conditions of the crisis and its global-imperial coordinates. It argues that to understand the politics of anti-immigrationism in contemporary Britian we need to look both at the colonial legacies that shape the former metropole but also its place within late imperial capitalism. The small boats crisis is not only a product of the contradictions of an unequal and extractive world system and the British state’s role as a junior partner to US Empire. But increasingly this borderzone, and those like it, are sites of opportunity for extreme nationalist political forces and for sections of capital to scrape value from the dispossessed. By looking at the small boat crisis in this way, we are able to learn important lessons about our wider political moment and the struggles that define it.
This talk is based on collaborative research from the Channel Crossings project with Arshad Isakjee, Uni of Liverpool, Thom Davies, Uni of Nottingham, Tesfalem Yemane, Uni of Liverpool, Lucy Mayblin, Uni of Birmingham and with research support from Asma Malik, Haleemah Alaydi, Zeraslasie Redie Shiker, Yagoub Hamdan Matar, Bushra Manochehry. It will be the subject of a forthcoming book Channel Crossings (under contract with BUP).
Joe Turner is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of York. His work examines how borders reproduce racialised and structural violence in Northern Europe. He is particularly interested in the role of border control in the histories of colonialism and imperialism. Joe is the author of Bordering Intimacy (2020), Migration Studies and Colonialism (2021, with Lucy Mayblin) and the forthcoming Postcolonial Historical Sociology (also with Lucy Mayblin). He is currently finishing a co-authored book manuscript titled Channel Crossings: Asylum, Small Boats and Late Imperialism at Britain's Borders.
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