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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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.
What do advancements in AI mean for immigration? We discuss the current and emerging practices of new technologies in the field, and explore developments in the use of predictive analytics, automated risk assessment and profiling. In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we discuss the current and emerging practices of using new technologies in the field of immigration, focusing on how border control, immigration and asylum policies are being impacted by the use of new technologies especially in and around Europe. With the help of our panel, we explore recent developments in the use of predictive analytics, automated risk assessments and profiling in immigration, and their main ethical implications. We are joined by Derya Ozkul, Senior Research Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford and member of the Migration Oxford network; and Caterina Rodelli, EU Policy Analyst at Access Now, a civil society organisation defending the digital rights of people and communities at risk. Derya is one of the project leads at the Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum Seekers (AFAR) project and her work explores the uses of new technologies in migration and asylum fields and their real-life impact on people on the move. Caterina’s work explores issues related to biometric surveillance, artificial intelligence, and, together with several other civil society organisations, she leads the #ProtectNotSurveil campaign.
Guests: Derya Ozkul and Caterina Rodelli
Hosts: Rob McNeil and Jacqui Broadhead
Producer: Delphine Boagey
Communications: Delphine Boagey
The Migration Oxford Podcast
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.
