SSN seminar with Nikita Simpson "Hostile Environments"

Join the SSN Healthy Futures and Environmental Challenges streams as we host Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) for this seminar at Deakin Downtown. Nikita will be presenting on her work with Liz Storer and Suad Duale. The seminar will be live-streamed at this link. It will be chaired by Healthy Futures streamleader Samantha Thomas.

In-person guests are invited to join us for lunch from 13:00.

Hostile Environments: Housing Policy, Mould and Illness in Diasporic communities

The UK Government Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy is a set of administrative and legislative measures aimed at making it difficult for migrants to stay in Britain. Over more than a decade, this approach has combined securitised practices of bordering and policing, with policies which have defunded and hollowed out health and social care provisioning at community level.

This paper draws attention to the materiality of this hostile environment as it is experienced in the mouldy and damp homes of Somali families who inhabit temporary or precarious accommodation in Birmingham. Drawing on interdisciplinary (clinical, geographic, psychological, and ethnographic) fieldwork, we reveal how Somali families experiencing ‘homelessness’ are placed, by local authorities, in overcrowded, private and temporary accommodations of varying states of disrepair.

When these houses, hotels, or hostels begin to make them sick, blame is apportioned to their quotidian acts of care and homemaking such that they encounter mould as a form of corporeal punishment for seeking state resources. Through a bio-social-structural investigation, we argue that mould and the illnesses that accompany its bodily interactions cannot solely be understood as an artefact of austerity policies. Instead, attention to mould renders visible the embodied processes of racialised blame that are embedded within hostile environment policies, and act as a means by which those subject to it render wider forms of racial suffering visible to the state.

Dr Nikita Simpson is a Reader in Anthropology at SOAS (University of London) and Co-Director of CAMHRA - the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action. She researches, develops interventions, and provides policy advisory on mental health, care, and inequality. Her doctoral thesis (2021), funded through an LSE Doctoral Fellowship, focused on embodied forms of illness and mental distress amongst Gaddi tribal women in Himalayan North India. Nikita’s doctoral work has been awarded the Alfred Gell Prize, the Rosemary and Raymond Firth Prize, and the Firth Prize. Nikita’s work is published in a number of co-authored reports and policy briefs that have been widely read across the UK and EU. It is also communicated through a number of public media such as podcasts, and through a on Somali women’s experiences of Covid-19 in Birmingham that she co-directed. In collaboration with the psychotherapist, , Nikita works on the ways in which encounters with mould, disrepair, and state discipline in temporary accommodation generate particular forms of racial trauma. Her second new project is focused on ecological distress in the Himalayan region. With a team of shepherds and conservationists, Nikita is investigating the mental health impact of invasive W**d species, changing weather patterns, and land dispossession on marginalised groups. Thirdly, Nikita is a visiting research associate at the Sydney University Policy Lab, where she is advising on the project.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Deakin Downtown, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia