A selection of useful links to relevant reports, good practice resources, arts, and more by external friends and partners

Alternative maps

  • The Decolonial Atlas - collection of maps which help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state, based on the principle that cartography is not as objective as we are made to believe. 
  • Map of Stories - interactive map of Scotland produced by Scottish arts collective Transgressive North. The map collects 172 videos of oral stories, some arising from Scotland's indigenous languages and some coming from migrant and mixed-heritage traditions, spanning from the ancient to the contemporary.
  • Native Land Digital - Indigenous-led mapping service that can help people learn about the indigenous languages of the places where they are currently living.

Books and collections

  • David Gramling, Literature in Late Monolingualism: Literacies for the Linguacene (2024). This book examines how authors of contemporary novels investigate monolingualism, aiming to show us in vivid terms how monolingualism is still often calling the shots in our globalized aesthetic and political cultures today.
  • Erika Jiménez, Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Insights from Palestinian Youth (2024). Drawing on research in the occupied West Bank, this book explores the three layers of marginalisation faced by Palestinian young people – the Israeli occupation that denies them their humanity; the Palestinian pseudo-state that denies them a voice; and patriarchal structures that deny them agency – to show how these barriers influence their understanding of, and scepticism towards, human rights.
  • Jim Mackintosh, We are Migrant (2024). 'The poetic voice in this collection is restless, urgent, sad, and knowing. The knowing is a felt knowing, made in what Glissant calls the ‘Poetics of Relation’. We move through the collection across continents and camps, looking into the eyes of despair and consequences of war, insisting that even the lives wasted are not wasted. Insisting of the grief that is life.' (Alison Phipps)
  • Yahia Lababidi, Palestine Wail: Poems (2024). Yahia Lababidi, an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background, has crafted a poignant collection which serves as a heartfelt tribute to the Palestinian people, their struggles, and their resilience in the face of an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing. The collection, described as a love letter to Gaza, draws inspiration from the rich literary tradition of Palestinian resistance literature. Lababidi, known for his critically-acclaimed books of aphorisms, essays, and poetry, brings his unique voice to this personal, political and spiritual work.

Good practice

Languages

  • An Dream Dearg - activist group founded in 2017 to organise for Irish language rights in Northern Ireland. Their website contains many useful resources including a Language Rights handbook and tools for people living in Northern Ireland to email political leaders, make submissions to consultations, and more.
  • Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia - non-profit organisation established in 2000 to aid in the efforts of the Ojibwe language revitalisation movement through creating and distributing high-quality indigenous language materials.
  • We Are Tiger Dictionary - lexicon created by secondary aged pupils in a series of writing workshops exploring the language we use to express our emotions and how writing can help our mental health (which our own Tawona Sitholé was involved in facilitating).

Migration in the arts and media

  • Media - ZAM Magazine, a creative platform centred in Europe for African artists, writers and free thinkers. ZAM brings their work to a wider audience in the Netherlands, Europe, Africa and the world.
  • Film - The Elephant & The Room (2024), dir. by Anas Qadamani. Graduation film providing the historical context and framing of elephants as migrants within the political discourse. Content warning: this film contains real footage that includes scenes of death, violence against humans and other creatures, and instances of animals in distress.
  • Film - ‘Making this film was forbidden’: how Agnieszka Holland’s migrant thriller inflamed the Polish right, Claire Armistead interview with Agnieszka Holland on Green Border (2024) for The Guardian. In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so called 'green border' between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are caught in a geopolitical crisis.
  • Film - The Old Oak (2023), dir. by Ken Loach. A pub owner in a previously thriving mining community struggles to hold onto his establishment. Meanwhile, tensions rise in the town when Syrian refugees are placed in empty houses within the community.
  • Film - Surviving Translation (2023), dir. by Ling Lee and co-created with and based on original research by Charlotte Bosseaux. Documetary taking an in-depth look at the ethics of translation, focusing specifically on the traumatic experiences of female migrants.
  • Film - Nezouh (2022), dir. by Soudade Kaadan. Even as bombs fall on Damascus, Mutaz refuses to flee to the uncertain life of a refugee. His wife, Hala, and daughter, Zeina, must make the choice whether to stay or leave.

Reports, consultations and briefings

Resources for refugees and asylum seekers

UNESCO resources