UK detention centre (photo: Jennifer Allsopp)The relationship between migration and philosophy is one that could easily be understated in the current ‘hostile environment’ towards migrants and refugees in the UK. Skimming through our national media or tuning into pretty much any politician’s speech, most people would recognise that the debate over immigration reform is more characterised by populist scaremongering than by its rich philosophical insights. Words like ‘foreign scrounger’, ‘illegal’ and ‘benefit cheat’ are certainly normative, yet are hardly applied with critical rigor. Meanwhile, fundamental questions of human liberty and dignity are debated by a flawed democratic political system and mediated by the signatures of bureaucrats somewhere in Croydon, London.
The recent ‘Minds and Borders’ event, co-hosted at the University of Oxford by the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) and the newly established Migration Museum Project, sought to explore this terrain. In so doing, it highlighted a range of ways in which a philosophical lens could be applied to enrich the debate over migration. As articulated by the Chair of the Migration Museum Project, Barbara Roche, ‘there’s a really strong story here’. Migration raises more fundamental questions than 'should these people be here': it probes into the very essence of what it means to be human, as well as how we define our communities.
The event was one of several which seek to explore the contribution of migration to diverse areas of British intellectual life: medicine, architecture, social sciences and the arts. The panellists stemmed from a range of backgrounds: Julian Baggini, writer and broadcaster; Meena Dhanda, Reader in Philosophy and Cultural Politics at the University of Wolverhampton; and John Worrall, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics.
