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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Foreign.
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Listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. In this episode, Claudia Radeban and Saeed Kahn were joined by Rosie Tapsfeld, Director of Operations at City of Sanctuary UK.
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Rosie started working with City of Sanctuary UK in 2024, having worked on City of Sanctuary initiatives in Newcastle for a number of years beforehand. She leads the College of Sanctuary program of work and has seen firsthand how implementing inclus practices within further education providers can positively impact the mental health and well being of people seeking sanctuary.
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City of Sanctuary UK coordinates, supports and grows networks of welcome from community groups to schools and universities, local councils to libraries and theatres. The organisation works with individuals, groups and organisations in every area and in every sector to encourage inclusivity, solidarity and and compassion for people from a forced displacement background.
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We discuss a number of different issues with Rosie, including the political climate in the UK surrounding immigration, the role of Islamophobia in these discourses, and the notion of the nation state in creating refugees. So without further ado, let's listen in.
F
Welcome listeners to another episode of Radio Reorient. Today we are joined by Rosie Tatsfield from Cities of Sanctuary. Thank you so much for joining us today Rosie, we'll kick things off by asking about City of Sanctuary and what they do and your role within the organisation.
B
Thanks, Claudia. So, yeah, City of Sanctuary, I normally like to describe it as three things. So City of Sanctuary is a movement and that's a movement about trying to create welcome and belonging for all, but particularly for people who are seeking sanctuary in the uk. So when we talk about people seeking sanctuary, we're talking about people seeking asylum and refugees. We're also a network. So within our network we have around 80 local groups based all across the UK, so England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we have local groups on the ground called City of Sanctuary groups, sometimes operating under different names, essentially creating welcome and providing welcome activities in their local communities. And we also have a number of mainstream organizations and institutions who are involved in our networks as well. So as an example, we have Universities of Sanctuary Network, Schools of Sanctuary Network, local authorities, Councils of Sanctuary Network, and through that, mainstream organisations and institutions can be involved in our work. And for those recognised as kind of going above and beyond, there are what called Sanctuary Awards, so places can be recognised for the work that they're doing as well as an organisation, finally. So City of Sanctuary UK is a small refugee sector umbrella organization. So we're the charity that provides support to our groups and also to the mainstream organisations and institutions. And there are 12 of us who work for City of Sanctuary UK. We're all based across the UK, again, all based from home, so we don't have a central office space providing support to our network. My role within the organisation, so I'm director of Operations, as I mentioned, we're a really small organisation, so that's kind of anything and everything related to operations, managing the staff team, doing some of the operational kind of work as well, in terms of the support that we're providing to groups and organisations, as well as kind of supporting with the strategy setting and trying to kind of, I suppose, create space for us within the UK in terms of the refugee sector and trying to kind of add our experiences into that as well.
D
You know, Rosie, I mean, since even when I was, when I was a very young child, I remember the issue of migration. I just remember seeing the images on, on television. Whether it was after the war with 1971, which created Bangladesh, Vietnam, when I moved to America, these were some of the first images remember seeing there of people being airlifted and it seemed like what you're talking about here with refugees is really a subset of a broader topic of migration. And it always seemed as though refugees were treated separately that there was a welcoming of them, even if you had your rivers of blood speeches by Enoch Powell, and even if you had hostility toward people who were voluntarily migrating to the various countries, let alone illegal migration. But something's different. It seems as though refugees have now become seen as a toxic force and it almost betrays the very history and the politics of empire. In many cases refugees are coming from, in the case of the uk, I imagine from former colonies. And if not that, in the case of the US that didn't really have too many colonies, they're coming from conflict zones or war zones, many of which were created by the countries to which they're migrating. And I was just wondering how you see these kinds of anti migrant narratives that cannot help be thought of through the lens of a kind of racism or an orientalism.
B
Absolutely. And I think you're completely right. And we see it both within the kind of public spaces, so within public narratives, narratives and discourse, but also within the policy spaces as well. So the policies around refugee in asylum that have been different over time, increasingly the hostile environment kind of enters into all spheres as well as the refugee protection. In the past that was very much the case with asylum, but there was kind of protected spaces in terms of refugee resettlement. And we saw a very different kind of response to the Ukraine war when the government quickly set up the Homes for Ukraine scheme. And we have seen to many other crises that came before or after Ukraine as well. So. Absolutely. I think those kind of historical injustices are still very much woven into today's kind of structures and policies. And you're absolutely right in terms of those kind of colonial legacies and you know, where people move, why people move all of those things, you know, to try and separate those apart would be absolutely impossible. You know, people flee in conflict zones that have, you know, have direct links to colonial powers and you know, some of those things and you know, the ongoing kind of ramifications of that as well in terms of, you know, a kind of British point of view, Britain's roles in those conflict zones and in those areas as well, as well as the fact that, you know, a lot, a lot of the people who come seeking sanctuary in the uk, they are people who have links to the UK that might be family, that might be friends, that's language, that's, you know, culture. There's a whole load of things kind of hidden historically why people want to come, you know, or seek in the UK as a, as a place of safety. But yeah, I think again, another interesting point to what you Were speaking to the anti migrant narrative very much now is encompassing everybody seeking safety in the uk and that has really widened up. There doesn't seem to be that differentiation in the way that there was in the past in terms of, I think there are still hierarchies in terms of deserving and less deserving. We still see that that's still something that's there very strongly. But there definitely is this overall anti migrant narrative that is kind of stretching. And I mean, you will have seen, you know, we've all got horrendous examples on the streets of the UK that's affecting people who aren't even from, you know, who aren't from a migrant background, who, you know are British but are being targeted by that racism as well. So let alone four people who are coming seeking safety and are living in hotels and different things where they're often easily identified.
F
I think you bring up some really interesting points there, especially the idea of hierarchies and the deserving and undeserving migrant. Even in the last few days of, since we're recording this now, people talking about when they were in school.
B
They.
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Have Eastern European parents and being told the teacher, challenging any potentially prejudicial views with things like, well, you know, you wouldn't want to do the jobs of scrubbing floors or, you know, digging roads up and stuff like that. And it's a bit, you know, people have value beyond the horrible jobs that white British people don't want to do, you know, and other similar examples such as that or, you know, if a person from a migrant background does something good and it's, it's lauded as this amazing thing in relation to the fact that are from a migrant background. It's the idea that we need these things to validate people's humanity almost. You can only be a human if you play into these sorts of things. I mean, within your work, which is obviously greatly impacted by what's been referred to as the refugee crisis and some of the causes behind that. Do you think that this is to do with borders, this overarching idea of the nation's state and, you know, what would a world look like that did not make refugee hood or the need to flee places necessary? Especially given what you mentioned about, you know, links to England, the idea of English as this global language and the reasons why it is that global language, the people responsible for making it that dominant language. What would the world look like if we didn't have these issues around the nation's state and borders?
B
I think it's really, and I think it's a really interesting question because I feel like everything, all the things that we've talked about so far in terms of the anti migrant narrative and the kind of the context and the environment that we're operating within makes it harder and harder to visualize what it would look like that didn't make refugeehood necessary because it's become such a political hot topic and has become such a challenge over the past, however long and increasingly so, that I think it's really hard to even visualize that, let alone have a kind of sensible conversation about that. And I think that's really challenging and really challenging as a kind of operational context, I suppose, because how can we start to move away from some of those ideas and say things like oh actually borders have a real role in this and actually debording in is part of the solution and you know, the billions of pounds that we spend on bordering isn't effective. And what do you know that do people have a right to stay and a right to move? And what could that look like? And what does that look like is so hard to think about in today's context because we've moved so far away from that in terms of lots of the kind of, well, the narrative that's coming out of the, like the political, political system, media narratives as well as kind of narratives that we're hearing on the street as well. I think it's, it's, it's really to kind of think about it, but I do think it's really important and that we need to transform that thinking and that talking about how we talk about migration, about those hierarchies of deservingness in which some nationalities are still welcomed and some are seen as a threat because ultimately that is still how it, how it operates. But we just don't seem to think that that is the possibility or it wouldn't be possible to do that for other nationalities. We do, we can, we have historically. So why not open that out? Why not talk about that? Why not have those conversations? But like I say, it feels increasingly difficult to do that without being kind of targeted and kind of made to feel that that's an extreme way of looking at things rather than actually that's a really sensible policy idea to be having these kind of conversations.
D
Well, you know, on that, Rosie, on policy, it makes me think about like this real sense of panic and ferocious backlash to refugees has intensified since COVID restrictions have been lifted. And I guess it's ironic because it seems as though many of the countries from where these refugees are coming actually did better when it came to Covid than even the UK and the us. I mean, they were very compliant. They didn't have the luxury of these kinds of individualistic minded defiances and refusals to take the precautions that were being promulgated. Some, of course, the leaders of these countries themselves were defying them as we now have realized. And I wonder then that how has this political climate that as you've said, has shifted? How has it really affected the work at Cities of Sanctuary?
B
Hugely, to be honest. And it's never been a particularly easy context to work within. There's always been challenges and the challenges for people seeking sanctuary are kind of omnipresent. However, over the last few years, as you talk about since COVID restrictions, lifting it has just become increasingly challenging. I think that's for a number of reasons, but there's some really interesting research about the kind of narratives and how kind of media and political discourse has kind of shaped from talking about refugees to talking about small boats, to talking about migrants, to talking about invasions, swarms. You know, all of those kind of ideas have become very present and that has made that has. And it had an impact in terms of the kind of on the ground, what is happening. We have seen at City of Sanctuary uk, we've seen individuals being targeted on the street, racist attacks unfortunately on the rise increasingly common. We've seen, you know, hotel accommodation for people who are seeking asylum being targeted, being the target of protests, so called protests, obviously the racist riots of 2024 and some of the kind of violence that spread out. But again, throughout the summer of this year and ongoing, you know, there's myriad protests happening, popping up and down across the uk. The kind of discourse that's happening on social, both towards people who are seeking sanctuary, but also those support in them. So certainly for the refugee sector and organizations working within that incredibly challenging, you know, things that five years ago would have been unthinkable are now common and normal. Everybody's thinking about their security and everybody's thinking about what that looks like. That's both in person security for any kind of events that people are holding. That's like double checking everything, attendance lists, things that are kind of the opposite of making people feel welcome. I was talking to a colleague from another organization the other day talking about a drop in that they held and how they now had to have registrations and check people off. And these are people seeking sanctuary who are newly arrived in the area. You want to welcome them, bring them in, give them a Cup of tea, you know, talk to them. But actually you're having to go through all of that, ask people to see their asylum registration cards, different things, because people are really worried about being infiltrated. At City of Sanctuary UK we were the subject of a pretty awful online attack this summer where social media and some so called citizens journalists had come up with this idea that City of Sanctuary had been encouraging schools of Sanctuary to send Valentine's Day cards to people in hotels, to sex starved males in hotels. And this, you know, within a kind of 24 hour period of this being posted on social media, we had hundreds of emails into our organization. Threatening emails, harassing emails, people saying, how dare you, what are you doing to the uk? You know, the kind of language you can imagine. And this resulted in mainstream press articles about this and also resulted in various political people who are involved in politics, MPs and counsellors getting involved, lists of the schools who've been involved in our work going viral, people saying, I'm going to turn up outside the school gates, my child's not going to this school. All from something that was essentially misinformation. That was never the case. That had never been what the campaign was about. It was a Valentine's Day campaign which was called show youw Hearts for Refugee Rights this Valentine's Day. It was never about writing cards, you know, getting children. Of course it wasn't, but that wasn't the point. It made it incredibly difficult, completely derailed our operations for a significant period of time. For a small organization, you know, hugely impactful. Again, all of those things about security, thinking about staff, well being, all these things that kind of take away from what we should be concentrating on, our operations or strategy, our movement and kind of shifts us into, okay, how are we operating in this context? And increasingly that's the conversations we're having as a refugee sector. We're waiting to be tripped up, but we're waiting, you know, if you do the slightest thing wrong or not even wrong, somebody's waiting to look, look is looking at that. Somebody's searching through your website, looking for things you've done in the past. Someone's searching for a social media comment, why not use the right language to jump on that? And that's really challenging as a kind of context to be, to be operating in. And we're sat behind our screens kind of protected from this. You know, there are people in communities who aren't and you know, are bearing the brunt of this day in, day out. And it's absolutely horrendous and doesn't look like it's going away. Unfortunately, the holidays have a way of.
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I mean that sounds utterly horrifying and I think there's, there's a couple of things that you, you drew on there that I think they're really sort of important events for me. The, you know, the, the far right pogroms that came in the wake of Southport and they, they don't seem to be stopping, it seems to be continuing on and on and, and the kind of the, the focus that we see on so called asylum hotels, which again, really unpleasant way to sort of refer to a situation that frankly, nobody, nobody wants to be in. I think there's, there's something interesting here to draw on in terms of what you said about people that, you know, they are not refugees, they're not seeking asylum status, they're born in the UK and they, they are being wrapped up into this category of, you know, other foreigner invader. And there's, so, there's so many discourses around that, this kind of great replacement kind of theorizing that comes out of the far right at the minute. But I think that draws us to sort of an interesting point in the UK at the moment where there's kinds of, there's talks from the Labour Party of removing jewelry from refugees. A kind of something very reminiscent of the World War II era in the most disgusting way possible really. And like you mentioned about having to show your asylum card and things like that, this need to make people who have already been through hell kind of hypervisible within working with people in those situations. To what extent do you feel that Islamophobia is shaping those kinds of attitudes? Certainly since Southport stabbing where the attacker was falsely identified as a Muslim. And obviously now the topic of refugees and migrations, it's tied into discussions of terrorism, it's tied into discussions of security. And like you said about the Valentine's Day card, the idea that asylum hotels are filled with sex crazed males, the whole dangerous brown male narrative. How do you feel that, you know, within your work, do you feel Islamophobia is starting to particularly shape those interactions within broader anti refugee narratives?
B
Yeah, I think so, unfortunately. And I think we increasingly see the kind of conflating of asylum Islamophobia, grooming gangs, young men protecting our women and girls, that's kind of all wrapped up and in this kind of messy parcel that the far Right. Are using and using highly effectively to kind of stoke these fears and kind of increase that narrative around people seeking safety and why they're here and you know, all those kind of things. I think, yeah, it's really kind of definitely shaping the broader anti migrant, anti refugee narrative. And again, doesn't set, doesn't look like it's going anywhere because it does seem that it's unfortunately kind of struck a chord and it seems to have been fairly effective, I think in terms of a far right approach, kind of seeing lots of, you know, I mean, I say lots of how the numbers are, but women and you know, women dressed up and protesting the pink, so called pink protests and doing those protests outside of hotels and this kind of idea that this is about protecting our, our women and girls I think has been. Yeah. Particularly awful but potentially effective if that's what you're trying to do in terms of sowing that division. Yeah, unfortunately.
D
So I think it's really fascinating what you're saying there, Rosie, because I mean, of course the status and the condition of women is such an important issue, but in current debates and discussions regarding, shall we say, members of, of the establishment and the elite and their particular engagement, shall we say, with, with, with, with young women, it's interesting how this may be really a deflection and, and a planned distraction from really where the, the crux of those kinds of egregious, the violations of women is, is, is occurring. And, and it makes me. We are changing as a society. In the United States, for example, parades are being canceled because people are fearful of ice, the Integration and Customs Enforcement raids occurring. They're picking up kids from, as they're being dropped off in school. The World cup now is in jeopardy about whether ICE will, will raid there. So this is going beyond, of course, refugees. And it seems as though it's also going beyond incoming refugees or new refugees. For example, in America, Hispanics and also Somalis now are targeted, some that have been in the United States for well over a generation. The President of the United States referring to them collectively as garbage. So the rot is so deep and as a result of that, what can people then do to support refugees and what are some of the ways that they can disrupt what are becoming these increasingly pernicious narratives?
B
Yeah, and it's nice, nice to end on this question because I think it is really important. I think a lot of what we've talked about, it can feel quite overwhelming and all consuming and. Okay, well that's how it is. And this is set to continue however, day in, day out, at City of Sanctuary, we hear absolutely amazing stories of people within their communities going above and beyond to welcome people and to support refugees. Whether that's a volunteer setting up an English class for newly arrived refugees in a small rural location, or whether that's a council kind of implementing sanctuary strategies and thinking about commissioning and grant funding through a sanctuary lens. We see all of these different ways that people can kind of come together and try and support people and offer that welcome. I think there's also kind of more broadly than I suppose that that on the ground level, kind of being involved in the movement, in campaigning, in trying to kind of amplify some positive narratives and speak out against the negative narratives, against the misinformation and trying to counter that we were talking about earlier about kind of what would a world look like that didn't make refugeehood necessary. Trying to have those conversations to transform that thinking and be clear that the alternatives are possible. There are lots of alternatives that have existed. There are examples within the UK of schemes that have been much better than other schemes. There are examples that we can look to across the world. There are lots of things that we can do to try and kind of shape the agenda and try and kind of shift that political discourse to something that is more open to thinking about. This is actually a really positive thing that throughout history has been really positive and that people, people are going to move and that people have a right to move and that that is a really positive thing. And aren't we a better society and culture for that?
F
Well, I think we should call it on that positive note, on a topic that certainly there's a great deal to think about and there's a lot of negatives to be said. So it's nice to consider that there is the capacity to change those narratives, as you said, and, you know, hope for a world where refugee hood doesn't become necessary any longer. So to wrap up there, I'll say thank you to our listeners for listening in. Thank you to Rosie for joining us. And if you're listening, you should have a look at the work that City of Sanctuary does online. And we look forward to seeing you at another episode of Radio Reorient.
A
You're listening to Radio Reorient, the decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. This is Radio Reorient exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with.
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Saeed Khan, Claudia, Radovan Hizamiyeh and me, Chella Ward.
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You've been listening to another episode of Radio Reorient and I thought that one was another really fascinating episode with a guest who was really able to use this question about sanctuary, about refugees, about all of the ways that nations include certain people and exclude other people. We'll come back maybe to the sorts of narratives they use to do that, but was able to open up that discussion through a very realistic focus on what this is like for actual people who are excluded at borders. And it made me think of a number of different things. It made me think of Harshawali's book on border Europe, on the idea of borders being created not as things that exclude accidentally, but created in order to deliberately exclude. That's to say, created to preserve a sense of Europe's whiteness, preserve a sense of this kind of post Christian secularity that comes to define Europe. And that makes me think about something that, that for me has been a real theme throughout this series, which is the question of how does Reorient as a project think about that form of racism that we often call Islamophobia? And I've been asking this question repeatedly. We have come back repeatedly to questions of defining Islamophobia, resisting Islamophobia, Islamophobia as a kind of racism, Islamophobia, you know, as a kind of nationalist discourse force that's directed against Muslims, but also those who are Muslimized, that's to say, those who can be positioned as Muslims or proximate to Muslims. I'm thinking of, for example, pro Palestine demonstrators who are not necessarily always Muslim but can be victims of Islamophobia nonetheless. And what all of that sort of made me think when I was, as I was listening to this, when I started to think through. Well, what do I think is kind of specific to the way that Reorient talks about Islamophobia as a type of racism. And I think that it's this, this idea of Islamophobia being related to or, or I think I would even say caused by ethno nationalism, right. So caused by a particular way of understanding statehood that says that, you know, a state is for one racially defined group of people. We see that ethnationalism operating particularly murderously, you know, by the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine. But we also see this kind of ethno nationalist project repeating itself, know, across Europe and the so called west, particularly by the exclusion of the Muslim. I think that seems to me the, the common thread that, that links Together, all of the projects that we've been, you know, criticizing or, or kind of resisting or opposing over the course of, of this series, which has been about resistance, is this idea that all of these projects are formulated around a kind of ethno nationalism, where the ethnos in Greek, that's to say the people to whom the state is said to belong, is defined by the exclusion of the Muslim. And you see that in refugee discourses because you see refugees being understood to be more Muslim than they in fact are. Refugees are often presumed to be Muslim, even if they're not. You see the same kinds of sort of bogeyman type racist fears get attached to refugees that get attached to Muslims. For instance, instance, the bogus fear that refugees are going to sexually assault white women, for example. That's something that we could trace the connection between that discourse and the also equally racist Islamophobic discourse of the grooming gangs, for instance. Right. This idea that Muslim men are more likely than others to, to sexually abuse white women. So in a sense, I think what this episode really helped us to, to reflect on was these kinds of, of more epistemological questions about Islamophobia. Questions around, well, how does ethnonationalism create Islamophobia and to what extent does it therefore define all of these various regimes that we've been talking about resisting over the course of this episode?
F
I think that that highlights a number of really important points, not just from this episode, but a number of the others that we've looked at across the season, including when we've been discussing the prejudices against Uyghurs in East Turkestan, when we've been speaking about Palestine. And I think a number of the sort of the things that really stood out for me for this episode was the discussions about the relationship between refugeehood and the politics of Empire. And some of the things that really leapt out was why people come to the uk you know, quite often it's because they have, you know, they have people here or it's shared language. And that that sort of doesn't get brought up much whenever there's the conversation about, well, there was five countries they could have stopped in before that. Well, why the UK then? What about that shared language and how it came to be such a global language? And we've had some interesting conversations about language and linguistics across the season too. And I think you're absolutely right, Tchella, about these sorts of discourses that become tangled up in migration as well. Something we've spoken about is the relationship of refugees and discourses on asylum seeking in relation to terrorism, to security, to the grooming gangs. And Rosie actually brought up a really incredible example, quite distressing about this idea of, you know, the focus on so called asylum hotels as being full of sex crazed men. And it always comes back to this notion of the dangerous brown man. And it's the way that it's all so very tied up with each other. I think that this episode sort of highlighted that really nicely.
D
I think on that point, Claudia, regarding Empire, which has been part of the, the common thread through the season is of course also colonialism. And, and looking at the west in this legacy, I don't think there's anyone that's that that can claim immunity from accountability, whether it was through military intervention, colonialism, financing these colonial and imperial imperialistic projects, or just simply being a beneficiary of it. All of these things couched, of course in violence. And it's no coincidence and it's certainly ironic, I suppose, that colonialism is known as the great game because literally what this meant was that the west was using people to go ahead and.
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Move.
D
Human beings around a board that they regarded as being the world world, whether it was through slavery, whether it was through indentured servitude. The notion of dislocation and upheaval was something that was actually created by the west. And then when its project has yielded refugees, even contemporarily through conflicts and wars that it has instigated or has been heavily involved. And the hypocrisy is just yet another example of multiple hypocrisies that then have to be understood as being the context in which Islamophobia exists.
C
Absolutely, Saeed, I think you're completely right there. I also thought it was really interesting how Claudia mentioned the notion of the dangerous brown man and how that came up in the interview in the recording as well, because I was thinking of Spivak and sort of you continue beyond the dangerous brown man trope of the white men saving the brown women from the brown men. She continues to write something along the lines of it being, you know, this saving is a mark of a good society. And I think in many ways this overlapping of kind of Islamophobia, broader anti refugee sentiment is increasingly becoming seen as this sort of mainstreamed, almost respectable racism and that, that kind of mark of a good society that they position themselves in relation to this other. And it's very much through this sort of colonial legacy lens in many ways. And I think as we've all kind of mentioned and as Rosie mentions as well, it's done simultaneously with this cultural amnesia, this very convenient omission of British legacy and a complete disconnect of why, you know, what has happened. Of course, it shapes current migration patterns and current refugee patterns, but there's this complete disconnect that we seem to see in all of that. So it's really important, I think, that we recenter that within this conversation that.
A
Makes me think about something else that's really kind of core to the Reorient project, which is the question of the importance of history. Right. Because one of the ways that you stop cultural amnesia from being so powerful is by having an approach to history that reminds us of this context of empire and thinking about that really common phrase that you hear in kind of anti colonial movements very often that goes, we are here because you were there. Right. Which is a kind of attempt to remind the colonizer who's sitting in the colonial north complaining about refugees and migrant people that the fact that those refugees and migrant people exist, you know, is because of the attempt to establish empire. It's a direct result of empire. And not just of empire, of course, but also of the, the, you know, the Eurocentric imposition of nation states, you know, as the, the only way of constituting power. So there are a number of different ways that that empire plays a role in, in sustaining the creation of, of refugees, while at the same time empire wants to forget that it was empire that did that work. So I think that work of remembering, which is ultimately the work of the historian, is also really at the core of what it means to resemble, resist these kinds of racist discourses about refugees and migrant people. And that seems to me to be a useful point on which to end this season of Radio Reorient. We've talked about various different modes of resistance, openings to decolonial resistance, but also openings to thinking about a new history of the world, to thinking about or thinking beyond Eurocentrism, beyond ethno nationalism, beyond Orientalism, them. So that seems to me a good place to mark the work that we have done this season. This has been, as you know, no doubt by now, an episode of Radio Reorient. Your hosts this season have been Saeed Khan, Claudia Radovan, Amina, Isa Das, and me, Chella Ward. We will have a short break for a little while until the beginning of our next season, but we hope to see you then for another episode of Radio Reorient. Until then, take care and assalamu'. Alaikum. Join Vanguard for a moment of meditation. Take a deep breath. Picture yourself reaching your financial goals. Feel that freedom. Visit vanguard.com investinginyou to learn more. All investing is subject to risk.
Podcast: New Books Network — Radio ReOrient
Episode: Refugees and Sanctuary, with Rosie Tapsfield
Hosts: Claudia Radiven & Saeed Khan
Guest: Rosie Tapsfield (Director of Operations, City of Sanctuary UK)
Release Date: December 22, 2025
This episode of Radio ReOrient explores the complex realities of refugees and sanctuary in the UK. Hosts Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan speak with Rosie Tapsfield from City of Sanctuary UK about the shifting political climate around refugees, the legacy of empire and colonialism, the role of Islamophobia in migration discourses, and how both policies and narratives affect people seeking safety. The discussion covers how City of Sanctuary operates, the impact of rising hostility, and ways individuals and communities can actively support and change the conversation around migration and refuge.
(03:20–06:10)
“City of Sanctuary...is a movement about trying to create welcome and belonging for all, but particularly for people who are seeking sanctuary in the UK.”
(06:10–10:42)
“Those historical injustices are still very much woven into today's structures and policies...People flee from conflict zones that have direct links to colonial powers.”
(10:42–14:54)
“All the things that we've talked about...the anti-migrant narrative...makes it harder and harder to visualize what it would look like that didn’t make refugeehood necessary.”
(14:54–20:51)
“Five years ago would have been unthinkable, are now common and normal. Everybody’s thinking about their security...which are the opposite of making people feel welcome.”
“Within 24 hours of this being posted on social media, we had hundreds of emails into our organization—threatening, harassing emails...This resulted in mainstream press articles...and lists of schools going viral.”
(23:24–27:30)
“We increasingly see the conflating of asylum, Islamophobia, grooming gangs...all wrapped up in this messy parcel that the far Right are using…and using highly effectively.”
(27:30–31:16)
“People are going to move, and people have a right to move...Aren't we a better society and culture for that?”
(32:00–41:33)
“Islamophobia [is] related to or...caused by ethno-nationalism...where the state is for one racially defined group of people.”
“We are here because you were there—a direct result of empire...reminding the colonizer that refugees and migrant people exist because of empire.”
“City of Sanctuary...is a movement about trying to create welcome and belonging for all, but particularly for people who are seeking sanctuary in the UK.”
– Rosie Tapsfield (03:39)
“Those historical injustices are still very much woven into today's structures and policies...People flee from conflict zones that have direct links to colonial powers.”
– Rosie Tapsfield (07:58)
“All the things that we've talked about...the anti-migrant narrative...makes it harder and harder to visualize what it would look like that didn’t make refugeehood necessary.”
– Rosie Tapsfield (12:38)
“Five years ago would have been unthinkable, are now common and normal. Everybody’s thinking about their security...which are the opposite of making people feel welcome.”
– Rosie Tapsfield (15:57)
“We increasingly see the conflating of asylum, Islamophobia, grooming gangs...all wrapped up in this messy parcel that the far Right are using…and using highly effectively.”
– Rosie Tapsfield (26:04)
“People are going to move, and people have a right to move...Aren't we a better society and culture for that?”
– Rosie Tapsfield (29:11)
“Islamophobia [is] related to or...caused by ethno-nationalism...where the state is for one racially defined group of people.”
– Chella Ward (32:23)
“We are here because you were there—a direct result of empire...reminding the colonizer that refugees and migrant people exist because of empire.”
– (A, 41:33)
This episode offers a rich, multifaceted discussion on sanctuary, refugees, and the toxic narratives shaping their lives in the UK and beyond. It draws clear connections between contemporary racism, Islamophobia, and colonial legacy. Rosie Tapsfield’s firsthand accounts highlight both the acute challenges faced by those seeking sanctuary and the courage of communities building welcome amid adversity. The closing reflections call for historical awareness and decolonial resistance as essential to any meaningful change.