All by Hari Reed

A new politics of solidarity?

Over the past five years, tens of thousands of ‘ordinary people’ have undertaken voluntary work in support of, and in solidarity with, forced migrants in Europe. The New Internationalists: Activist Volunteers in the European Refugee Crisis, edited by Sue Clayton, aims to capture the scale and diversity of this international activist movement, lauded as one of the largest in European history. The book foregrounds the testimonial accounts of those volunteers who, with little to no training or support, worked to provide emergency aid, conduct sea rescues, develop community support structures, organise protests and advocacy campaigns and launch legal challenges with and on behalf of displaced people.

Refugees at IWM – Where turning away is an option

There is nothing shocking, dramatic or distressing about Forced to Flee. It avoids representing any of the physical effects of forced displacement on the human body: anguish, injury, illness, destitution, death – or crying. The exhibition not only challenges the idea of the refugee as a silent suffering body, but interrupts the whole set of emotional relationships that go along with that idea. Forced to Flee spans a century of refugee history, but rather than taking each historical moment in turn, the exhibition follows the steps of a ‘typical’ refugee story: the departure, the journey, the arrival, the asylum procedure, the integration process.

Protestimony

As part of her research into how humanitarianism has been changed by Calais, Hari Reed and collaborators have curated an exhibition currently showing at the Edinburgh Festival. Here she showcases some of the images, questions and dilemmas of the show. Protestimony will showing in Norwich as part of Refugee History's Being Human Festival in November.'