Keynote Speakers
Leah Cowan
Leah Cowan is a writer and editor on race, gender, migration, state violence and their intersections. She is the former Politics Editor at gal-dem, an online magazine and media platform run by women and non-binary people of colour. Leah also works at Project 17, an advice centre for migrant families who have No Recourse to Public Funds and are facing homelessness and destitution. Leah has written for publications including Vice UK, Huck, DOPE magazine, and the Guardian and in October 2018 delivered a TEDxTalk presenting an intersectional analysis of emotional labour. Her first book, Border Nation: A Story of Migration (Pluto Press, 2021) has just been followed by Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? (Verso Books, 2024).
Dr Agnes Woolley
(Associate Professor in World Literatures, University of Southampton)
Agnes Woolley’s research makes the case nationally and internationally for the emergent, multi-disciplinary field of Critical Migration Studies, focusing on literature, theatre and film. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, refugee arts, climate change and contemporary literature. She is currently working on two interrelated projects. The first is an examination of the interrelationship between contemporary screen cultures and geopolitical refugee discourses in the forthcoming book Stateless Cinema (Bloomsbury). The second focuses on the idea of ‘migrant documentality’, examining how legal, bureaucratic, and legislative texts that determine contemporary migrant life constitute a neglected social ontology. She is a regular blogger on migration issues and works with grassroots refugee organisations.