Tuesday 23 February 2021, 5.00pm-6.00pm
Speaker: Dr Vanessa Hughes (Department of Social Policy, LSE)
Chair: Dr Timo Fleckenstein
Abstract:
This paper examines the intersection between immigration status, life-course, and the experience of time. Based on ethnographic research, it looks at how time and life-course transitions are experienced by young people who are in constant encounter with the immigration regime in the UK. The encounters at this intersection produce a complex landscape that young people must navigate during their transitions to adulthood, producing a messy and complex temporal matrix. This temporal matrix distinctly shapes young people’s lives and migration experience: a sense of waiting and feeling stuck before getting status; paradoxical adulthood transitions for young people throughout the application process; and long-term uncertainty that is produced as a result of the immigration regime.
Bio:
Vanessa Hughes is an LSE Fellow in Social Policy. Her main research interests are in people's lived experience of migration, welfare, and education policies, with a particular focus on how immigration status produces social inequalities and shapes stratification through restricting access to education and welfare rights. Previously she was an ESRC-funded doctoral student in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Before her doctoral studies, Vanessa worked as a researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at the University of Oxford. In 2015 she co-founded the social enterprise actREAL which brings academic research on social issues into the community by using theatre and performance to bring it to life. Vanessa has also worked for the Council of Europe and the Migrants' Rights Network.