The Migration Oxford Podcast

• How welcoming are UK cities for newcomers?

  Should we be optimistic about the future of welcoming in UK cities? In this feature episode, we navigate the policies, practices and perseverance essential to strengthen migrant welcoming and inclusion in the UK. What does it mean for a city to be genuinely welcoming? How can cities foster inclusive attitudes and how do local policies and practices shape the experiences of those who have newly arrived? Is optimism realistic and, ultimately, useful? In this special episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we speak with Jacqueline Broadhead, Director of the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, the knowledge-exchange arm of COMPAS at the University of Oxford. Jacqui highlights that creating welcoming, inclusive cities is not simply an ideal; it is essential for the future of increasingly diverse urban spaces. Yet too often, policy and practice are not grounded in the research and theory needed to make this work meaningful and effective. How can practitioners and academics bridge this gap? We explore the work of the Global Exchange (GEM) over recent years and take a closer look at the Inclusive Cities project, which applies an interdisciplinary, research-driven framework to explore the work of 12 UK cities and international partners. Together, we ask how cities can best develop and implement welcoming policies, and consider the challenges they face in navigating governance at both local and national levels. Jacqui’s new book, Welcoming Cities, moves past critique to offer a constructive, action-oriented approach to integration and social cohesion. This conversation provides a preview of what the book offers UK policymakers, regional leaders, and scholars across sociology, political science, migration studies, and urban governance. Welcoming Cities (Bristol University Press, 2025) is available here. Jacqui Broadhead oversees a wide portfolio of knowledge-exchange and research initiatives that aim to extend and deepen COMPAS’s international contribution to sharing expertise among academics, policymakers, practitioners, civil society, and others in the migration sector. Her work focuses on local government, integration and inclusion, and understanding how place-based narratives can facilitate the shaping of more inclusive communities.

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• Pedal Power: Open City and The Bike Project

  Community, refugees, and urban life: what’s cycling got to do with it? We explore refugee women’s experiences in London through the ESRC Open City initiative and a participatory film with The Bike Project. In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we explore how mobility, belonging, and everyday urban life intersect in London, and how newcomers reshape the city through movement. Our focus is a participatory, arts-based collaboration with The Bike Project, an NGO that provides refugees with free bicycles. At its core, the initiative asks how movement - both physical and social - can create pathways to belonging, access, and agency for those newly arrived. The Bike Project’s work is simple yet transformative: bicycles enable refugees to travel independently, connect with services, and build confidence navigating London. But beyond practical utility, cycling becomes an embodied way of claiming space, of becoming visible in the city, and of weaving new rhythms into urban life. Our discussion explores this duality - bikes as both tools of mobility and symbols of presence in urban spaces that are at once open and exclusionary. We welcome Dr Eda Yazici, Senior Researcher at the University of Bristol, and Professor Michael Keith, Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the PEAK Urban project. Together, they reflect on how collaborative, arts-based approaches can reveal the lived realities of migration and the permeability of the city itself. The project invited refugee women connected with The Bike Project to co-produce short and long-form films documenting their experiences of arrival and adaptation. These films move beyond representation to highlight how everyday mobilities shape inclusion, resilience, and visibility in the city. Our conversation situates these narratives within wider debates about mobility at multiple scales. From the global journeys of displacement to the intimate routes traced through neighbourhoods and cycle lanes, mobility both enables and constrains urban life. Arts-based collaborations, as this project demonstrates, can shed new light on how these scales intersect and how cities might be reimagined as more open and welcoming. Listeners can view the films co-created through this initiative online at Cycling Visibilities. Together with the discussion, they offer a powerful insight into the experiences of refugee women cycling through London - making themselves visible, claiming urban space, and reshaping the city in the process.

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• Pedal Power: Open City and The Bike Project

  Community, refugees, and urban life: what’s cycling got to do with it? We explore refugee women’s experiences in London through the ESRC Open City initiative and a participatory film with The Bike Project. In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we explore how mobility, belonging, and everyday urban life intersect in London, and how newcomers reshape the city through movement. Our focus is a participatory, arts-based collaboration with The Bike Project, an NGO that provides refugees with free bicycles. At its core, the initiative asks how movement - both physical and social - can create pathways to belonging, access, and agency for those newly arrived. The Bike Project’s work is simple yet transformative: bicycles enable refugees to travel independently, connect with services, and build confidence navigating London. But beyond practical utility, cycling becomes an embodied way of claiming space, of becoming visible in the city, and of weaving new rhythms into urban life. Our discussion explores this duality - bikes as both tools of mobility and symbols of presence in urban spaces that are at once open and exclusionary. We welcome Dr Eda Yazici, Senior Researcher at the University of Bristol, and Professor Michael Keith, Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the PEAK Urban project. Together, they reflect on how collaborative, arts-based approaches can reveal the lived realities of migration and the permeability of the city itself. The project invited refugee women connected with The Bike Project to co-produce short and long-form films documenting their experiences of arrival and adaptation. These films move beyond representation to highlight how everyday mobilities shape inclusion, resilience, and visibility in the city. Our conversation situates these narratives within wider debates about mobility at multiple scales. From the global journeys of displacement to the intimate routes traced through neighbourhoods and cycle lanes, mobility both enables and constrains urban life. Arts-based collaborations, as this project demonstrates, can shed new light on how these scales intersect and how cities might be reimagined as more open and welcoming. Listeners can view the films co-created through this initiative online at Cycling Visibilities. Together with the discussion, they offer a powerful insight into the experiences of refugee women cycling through London - making themselves visible, claiming urban space, and reshaping the city in the process.

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• Bitter Carrots: A Restrictive Migration Agenda

  Who is the anti-migration agenda actually serving, and what are the alternatives? We welcome experts from the six-year-long MIGNEX project, which gathered a range of perspectives to explore questions of migration and global development. Over recent decades, there has been a growing emphasis towards stopping migration to the EU. Policy tools that focus on return and readmission aim to control migration flows from non-EU countries while development aid in countries of origin is oriented towards preventing migration. Although early days, the aftermath of the European Parliament and UK elections suggest much of the same is yet to come; one case in point being the UK’s announcement to increase aid spending with the aim of reducing migration at source. But what are the (unintended) impacts of a narrow focus on the restriction of migration, on the EU, its member states, and countries of origin? And what implications does this have for migrants themselves? How does this focus impact other policy agendas or, for instance, the ability to fill EU skills and labour shortages? And ultimately, are these ambitions even realistic? Is the assumption that migration can be prevented reflected in the evidence? In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we welcome experts Jessica Hagen-Zanker, Senior Research Fellow and Head Migration and Displacement Hub at the Overseas Development Institute; Leander Kandilige, Associate Professor of Migration Studies at the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana; and Carlos Vargas Silva, Professor of Migration Studies at COMPAS and a Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Together they draw on six years of research conducted with the MIGNEX project which gathered data on the migration-development nexus from across 25 local areas in 10 countries. Now concluded, MIGNEX gathered a range of perspectives to interrogate questions of migration and global development, ultimately asking who is the anti-migration agenda actually working for and what are the alternatives?

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• Robo-dogs and The Rise of Crimmigration

  In a world obsessed with AI, what are robo-dogs and how are they deployed at border control? With the rise of “crimmigration” across the world, the lines between migration management and criminal law are becoming blurred. The rise of "crimmigration" on a global scale is seeing the lines between migration management and criminal law being blurred, often in an effort to exercise surveillance of people on the move. What does this mean for people at the border? Can border technologies be used for good? In a world obsessed with artificial intelligence, why have private sector interests and the growing border industrial complex set the stage for new innovations? Looking at the UK and North America, we examine new legislation and how they can fail to address the high-risk impacts of using technologies for border security and national security purposes to assist in detecting, identifying, apprehending, and removing individuals who are entering illegally. We examine how AI used at the border intersects with racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, and question if the COVID-19 pandemic has normalised widespread surveillance through data collection and movement tracking. In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we welcome Petra Molnar, Harvard Faculty Associate, lawyer, anthropologist, and author of the forthcoming book The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence; and Dr Peter Walsh, Senior Researcher at The Migration Observatory and the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. We explore how border technologies impact every aspect of migration – from robo-dogs and DNA collection, to algorithms and iris recognition – to reveal the human issues beyond the digital frontier.

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