Skip to main content

Professor Michaela Benson to speak on migration on 12 March 2025

Category
Events
Date

SSP/CERS Seminar

Date: 12 March 2025

Time: 12.30-13.45

Place: Social Sciences 12.21/12.25

Speaker: Michaela Benson, Professor in Public Sociology at Lancaster University and Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation.

Title: Hong Kongers, Ukrainians and the coloniality of migration and citizenship: new humanitarian visas and the making of ‘good migrants’ for ‘Global Britain’

Abstract:

This paper offers a view from below onto the UK’s ‘safe and legal routes’. It offers a critical evaluation of the scaling up of bespoke humanitarian migration routes within the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime via the Hong Kong BN(O) and Ukraine visa schemes. It centres the voices of beneficiaries of these schemes arriving in the UK via these schemes to explore what we can learn from their understandings and experiences. This empirical lens—the first to bring together the Hong Kongers and Ukrainians offers unique insight into how those with such legal statuses position themselves on the migration-asylum continuum and how they navigate understandings and expectations of what it means to be a ‘good migrant’ in post-Brexit Britain. Through these insights, the paper moves beyond the narrative framing of humanitarian visas as the UK delivering on its moral and historical commitments to offer a novel interpretation that highlights instead how these bespoke protections are implicated in the politics of migration. As the paper concludes, these new visas bear the marks of the coloniality of the migration-asylum regime, and are integral to the workings of racial capitalism in the post-Brexit migration regime.

Bio:

Michaela Benson is Professor in Public Sociology at Lancaster University and Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation. Her current research focuses on migration, citizenship and the UK’s borders after Brexit and how this relates to longer histories of racialised immigration controls. This research has been supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/V004530/1] and British Academy [MD19\190055]. In addition to her academic publications, she hosts and produces Who do we think we are? the podcast debunking taken for granted understandings of migration and citizenship in Britain today.