Dr Taulant Guma
Edinburgh Napier University
Taulant (Co-convener – PI) is Associate Professor in Human Geography in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. With 20 years of experience of doing empirical research with various migrant groups, his work is broadly concerned with understanding different processes of marginalisation that affect migrants’ lives and the societies they live in. His work has covered a wide range of migration-related issues including risks and insecurities; race and ethnicity; civil society and participation; place making and belonging; housing and inequality; online networks and transnationalism; Brexit and EU migration. Taulant is interested in research that is participatory and focused on everyday experiences and realities. Amongst the collaborative research projects that he has led include an ESRC-funded study (2020-2022) on the everyday experiences of temporary accommodation amongst asylum seekers and refugees during the Covid pandemic. The study was co-designed with Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment (MORE) – a grassroots and migrant-led organisation based in Glasgow – and aimed at raising public awareness about poor and inadequate housing in the city, influencing asylum policies and changing the housing provision for the better.
Dr Kirsten MacLeod
Edinburgh Napier University
Kirsten (Co-convener) is a Professor in Creative Media Practice in the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier where she teaches on the BA Television programme and School Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Kirsten combines her research and practice as a documentary filmmaker, often working on community based collaborative and participatory projects such as I’m Still Here, a participatory documentary made with asylum seekers in Glasgow; Bleeding Free, made with students at Edinburgh Napier about period poverty in Scotland and Uganda; and The Pacific Community Filmmakers Consortium which she created with AHRC/GCRF funding to promote community filmmaking in the Pacific and with a focus on gender based violence. Kirsten is interested in the intersections between media practice, participation, collaboration, communities, gender and sport.
Yvonne Blake
MORE – Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment
Yvonne (Co-convener) is Community Development Practitioner and Racial Justice and Migrants’ Rights Campaigner. She is the co-founder of MORE, Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment, a grassroots organisation in Glasgow campaigning for asylum seekers and displaced people’s access to employment, education, decent, housing and dignity. Formed in 2018, MORE is volunteer-based group that comprises asylum-seekers, refugees and local allies who collectively campaign for asylum-seekers rights to work, right to access full time college and University education, right to decent housing, and right to be treated with dignity.
Dr Guanyu Jason Ran
Edinburgh Napier University
Jason’s (Co-convener) research investigates the process and outcome of immigrants’ settlement in major Western societies, with a particular focus on Asian immigrants in Australasia, continental Europe, and the United Kingdom. Building on a transnational migration paradigm, his work is interested in the intersections between transnational migration regimes – including immigration policies, communication and transportation technologies, and the broader socioeconomic and political developments across the globe – and migrants’ agencies, their families and their community networks. Jason draws on collaborative and ethnographic approaches to examine both the convergence and divergence of those intersections and the way they impact immigrant population as well the societies they live in.
On the Margins 