'Matters of Everyday Life and Death' with Nishat Ashwan & Ben Highmore

Through strategies of surviving in crisis, experimentation within oppressive atmospheres, planning from below, reshaping domestic space-time, cutting with kitchen knives, or comprehending the personal as political, the everyday is not just a zone of normalisation, but also a site of active imagination, play and reinvention.

Nishat Awan is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL Urban Laboratory. Her research and writing focus on diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. Nishat will screen and discuss her video essay Pahaar (mountains), within the context of a long-term research project on displacement. The film shifts across border landscapes and villages in Pakistan and Turkey, exploring the hopes and desires of those who make perilous journeys across hostile borders.

Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent books are Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late Twentieth Century Britain (2023) and Playgrounds, the Experimental Years (Reaktion, 2024). He is currently working on two book projects. One is on the painter Frank Bowling and the other is on the state and potential of the humanities at a moment of multiple global emergencies. Ben will be talking about spaces of anticipatory reparation in a range of examples including adventure playgrounds.

Professor Rachel Garfield: Hello everyone, and thank you for coming. Welcome to one of our SoAH Presents events.

For those who don’t know, SoAH is the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. We have several research clusters – six, to be precise – in the school. Each term, one of the clusters organises a SoAH Presents event, where they invite speakers to discuss an issue, a problematic, or a subject relevant to their research cluster.

Tonight, we have the Sites and Situations research cluster presenting. In fact, Josie Barry will introduce the speakers shortly. I also want to mention that next term’s event will be hosted by the Radical Matter cluster, so please watch out for that. In the autumn, Material Engagement will take its turn, so do keep your eyes open. These events follow a similar structure and aim to foster engaging discussions.

Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment to thank a few people. Firstly, Josie Kane, who is one of the co-directors of Sites and Situations, alongside Jasper Joseph Lester. I also want to thank Josie Barry for her considerable efforts in organising tonight’s event, as well as Melanie Jackson, another key organiser. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge Emma Matis – hello, Emma at the back! – who has been instrumental in ensuring everything runs smoothly and that everyone knows what’s happening. Hopefully, everyone will also get paid – so thank you, Emma!

I’m really excited about this talk. I think it’s a fantastic event and exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. Now, I’ll hand over to Melanie Jackson, who will deliver the first introduction.

Dr Melanie Jackson: Thank you. Tonight, I will discuss the rationale behind bringing our speakers together. Over the past 50 years, an extraordinary range of intellectual thought has been introduced to art education – from philosophy to critical theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, cybernetics, politics, architecture, visual and other sensory cultures. It also embraces subculture, popular culture, esoteric realms, the local and the global, in addition to studying the practices of art-making itself.

This radical transdisciplinarity is not intended to turn all artists into theorists or academics, but rather to cultivate what John Roberts calls “techniques of indiscipline.” Indiscipline implies a creative response – an attitude of negation and challenge – through new forms and methods of production and perspectival thinking. It acknowledges a means of transfiguring convention and questioning the given with creative possibility.

As a member of the Sites and Situations cluster and the Sculpture programme, I’m delighted you could join us this evening to bring your work from the disciplines of architecture and cultural studies into the discourse of art. I look forward to exploring how your methods, subjects, and approaches to representation, spatial organisation, justice and injustice, the archive, and cartographies open up new possibilities for transformation.

I’m now going to hand over to Josie, who will introduce the themes of the everyday.

Dr Josephine Berry: Thanks, everyone, for coming. Welcome to ‘Matters of Everyday Life and Death.’ The title is a play on the 1946 Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death. For those unfamiliar with the film, it follows a character played by David Niven, who has to jump out of his Lancaster bomber after it is shot down by enemy fire. He survives but spends the rest of the film caught between two realms, struggling to save himself in both the earthly and celestial spheres.

This idea of being “betwixt and between” seemed particularly relevant to the question of everyday life – the way it straddles both formal and informal structures, setting up a series of interfaces. The everyday, as a concept and theoretical field, marks the intersection of subjective experience with general conditions – power relations, mass objects, policies, atmospheres, institutions, and infrastructures that shape and transform it. It marks the most common sites of experience, yet it is also a highly unstable category that can feel like a trap.

The first logical response to any generalisation of the everyday is: whose everyday? To invoke the everyday is to acknowledge its infinite variations – intersectional, geopolitical, and environmental differences in how life is experienced. It is easy to feel as though one is stepping into quicksand when trying to define it. How do we generalise? Whose right is it to look at and speak about drudgery, struggle, unnoticed hours or moments, dark hallways, and the improvisations of daily life?

Yet, the moment we begin to dismiss the concept, a counterargument arises. If we invalidate the everyday, do we risk overlooking an incredibly important realm of historical research and practice? The everyday has been a crucial subject of artistic and intellectual inquiry – on both a molecular and a more formal scale.

Historically, writers and artists, scholars and activists have taken hold of this very unstable zone as a site from which to act, think, describe, resist, reinvent, and aestheticize the places and ways in which we spend the majority of our lives. The everyday – or the every night, as it has also been called – is an important concept to consider. Often, we use this term unthinkingly, without recognising the significant ways in which people experience night differently depending on a range of intersectional or positional conditions.

For instance, I’m reminded of an interesting article I read in The Funambulist magazine about apartheid South Africa. In slum areas, enormous, high-intensity lamps cast artificial light down, over-illuminating the night so that darkness never truly existed. This example underscores how contested and complex the notion of the everyday – or the every night – can be. It is a slippery but vital subject to think through.

The everyday is the space of habit and monotony, but also of flashes of beauty, invention, and imagination. In fact, one compels the other: habit creates the need for reinvention, and reinvention transforms habit. As Saidiya Hartman has said, "Beauty is not a luxury; rather, it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure." In other words, the everyday demands aestheticisation as a way to withstand its pressures – its pain, its monotony, and, as Hartman puts it, its horribleness.

The everyday is a contradictory notion. It is porous, informal, and atmospheric, yet also structural, systematic, and relentless. It is a site of subtle sensations and fine-grained experiences, where power structures, social orders, and crises are internalised and recoded.

Today, we have the privilege of welcoming two wonderful speakers, Nishat Awan and Ben Highmore, to present their research into everyday life, spaces, and places. Each of them will speak about sites, spaces, or temporalities of unsettlement and precarity – but also about hope and reinvention – from quite different perspectives.

First, we have Nishat Awan, Professor of Architecture and Visual Cultures at UCL’s Urban Laboratory. Her research and writing focus on diasporas, migration, and border regimes. She is particularly interested in modes of spatial representation, especially in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. Nishat will screen and discuss her video essay Paha (Mountains) within the context of a long-term research project on displacement. The film shifts across border landscapes and villages in Pakistan and Turkey, exploring the hopes and desires of those who make perilous journeys across hostile borders.

Following Nishat, we will hear from Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. His most recent books include Lifestyle Revolution: How Taste Changed Class in Late 20th Century Britain (2023) and Playgrounds: The Experimental Years (2024). He is currently working on two new book projects – one on the painter Frank Bowling and another on the state and potential of the humanities in a moment of multiple global emergencies. Ben will be talking about spaces of anticipatory reparation, drawing from a range of examples, from adventure playgrounds to hospices.

Thank you very much. Let’s give our speakers a warm welcome!

[Applause]

Professor Nishat Awan: Thank you for that introduction and for the invitation. I’m really happy to be here, and I’d like to thank the entire Sites and Situations group for inviting me.

The title of this event, Matters of Everyday Life and Death, is particularly apt for my research, which focuses on migration and borders. In very simple terms, the way borders allow or disallow movement is a matter of life and death. We see this in the tragic images on the news – people drowning in the Mediterranean, or, more recently, reports that Trump has reopened Guantánamo Bay to unlawfully detain refugees. The situation is undeniably dire.

However, my research seeks not only to focus on death and violence – though, of course, I do not ignore them – but also to examine how people manage to build lives despite these challenges. I use the phrase forms of life, drawn from the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose important scholarship explores the relationship between representation and the category of the human. Wynter argues that representational practices create forms of life that, in turn, shape definitions of what it means to be human. In Enlightenment-era Europe, for example, the concept of the human was shaped by a capital-H definition – one that excluded many.

This idea – that representation produces forms of life and different definitions of the human – is often overlooked in discussions about migration. Humanitarian discourse frequently falls into the trap of rigid categorisation, reducing people to labels: the criminal migrant, the helpless victim, or other reductive archetypes. But when people cross borders, they are also actively producing new ways of being and living. The challenge is how to account for these realities in representation.

Migration discourse, in particular, struggles with representation. We’ve all seen the simplistic migration maps in popular media – arrows showing movement towards Europe or North America, often ignoring the vast, complex migration flows within Africa, Asia, and other regions.

The image you see on the screen is from an exhibition for my project Topological Atlas, which I have been working on for some time. It represents journeys differently. Rather than imposing external narratives, it lists places mentioned in interviews and conversations with people on the move, presented in the order in which they arose. This structure turns the conversation itself into a journey – one shaped by the lived experience of migration rather than by external categorisations.

One thing to note here is that this approach moves away from the directionality typically found in migration maps with arrows. Rather than imposing a linear representation of movement, it acknowledges the complexities and repetitions within migration journeys. When we closely examine these journeys, we notice that certain places appear repeatedly within the same conversation. This raises important questions: Are people being shunted back and forth across borders? Or is this repetition a reflection of the way they recall their journeys?

We know that in traumatic situations, memories do not always unfold in a neat, linear sequence. This insight is also relevant to the asylum interview process, which is a cornerstone of determining whether or not someone is granted asylum. The asylum interview demands that individuals present their stories in a logical and linear manner – despite the disruptions and trauma they have experienced. Any inconsistency in recall can be grounds for denying asylum.

To consider the forms of life that emerge within highly unequal and devastating situations, such as those depicted in these journeys, we need a different way of looking. This also requires a discourse beyond that of mere agency. I won’t go into the full background of the debate around agency in migration studies – it’s a vast topic – but suffice it to say that this map does not depict a straightforward notion of agency. Yes, people exercise agency in deciding whether to embark on these journeys, but this agency is highly contingent and constrained.

AbdouMaliq Simone, an urbanist, writes about agency in relation to the precarious lives of urban populations in the Global South. He discusses how people negotiate, broker, and position themselves in various ways to survive. This kind of hedging and manoeuvring is evident in the migration journeys I have been studying over the last few years.

Moving away from the European border, we arrive at a different understanding of agency. This image, for example, shows a bus station on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan – a key departure point for many of the journeys we are examining. The Topological Atlas project, which I have been working on, focuses on migration routes from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran toward Europe. We have conducted extensive research at the Pakistan-Iran and Iran-Turkey borders.

This bus station is a place where the smuggling of goods overlaps with the clandestine movement of people. A community has formed around these smuggling practices, supporting both an economy and a way of life. Paying attention to these borderland communities reveals the border not as a simple line in the sand but as a space that emerges through various practices – whether it is someone asking for identification, determining who can cross a checkpoint, or negotiating a bribe.

When we examine the border in all its complexity, we do not find the perfect victims required for humanitarian advocacy. Migration discourse often constructs a narrative that depends on identifying the perfect victim, someone whose suffering can be universally recognized and sympathized with. But in reality, what we find at the border are various forms of precarious labor that sustain its everyday functions – the border official who randomly checks IDs and can be paid off, the smuggler who was once a migrant themselves, the young boy making tea for travelers. These individuals all play crucial roles in the border’s functioning and in the cycles of displacement and precarity it produces.

Shifting focus, this next image is of a Syrian activist I met in Istanbul. He insisted on calling himself an exile, not a refugee. While he acknowledged that the Syrian conflict had created a massive refugee crisis, he did not see himself as part of that category. In his view, refugees were those in much greater need than he was. As a graphic designer, he had been involved in an activist collective exposing the brutality of the Assad regime, which ultimately forced him to flee Syria early in the revolution.

When we spoke, he drew a map of his escape. Because of his design skills, his map appears highly structured, showing a circulatory movement between Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey as he tried to find a way to live and continue his work. This illustrates how contemporary borders are not only meant to keep people out but also to keep them moving. Deportation regimes, precarious living conditions, and militarized borders work together to produce a global underclass – people who are both wanted and unwanted in different ways. Harsha Walia has written extensively about this in the context of temporary migration.

Understanding this system of circulation requires us to consider its temporal dimensions. Deportation regimes often mobilize time as a tool of control. Asylum applications can take years to process, yet once a decision is made, deportation can occur within hours. This is standard practice in the UK and elsewhere.

But temporality also shapes the possibilities for alternative forms of life within this harsh system. Consider again the bus station in Karachi. Within its rhythms of brokerage and deal-making, new possibilities for survival and movement emerge. These temporalities offer people moments to recalibrate their decisions, to find ways to live otherwise within mechanisms of control.

This final image is of an Afghan woman I met in Odessa in 2016. She and her family had been taken there by an agent who had promised to bring them to Europe. It was only when she met a lawyer that she realized she was not in Europe but in Ukraine. She described the long, difficult road journey that took over a month, and the weight of waiting for her life to restart.

When she began drawing her journey, she started with a small circle in the center of the page – her home in Afghanistan, which she had tried to leave multiple times to escape the Taliban. The lines radiating out from the circle represented each journey that had been interrupted. At one point, she paused and wrote the number 25,000 in the corner of the page – the amount, in US dollars, that her family had paid the agent to take them to Europe. In the accompanying video, she underscores this number with a hand gesture, marking the enormity of the cost.

This work is part of a larger research project, supported by European funding bodies, that seeks to understand the lived experiences of migration beyond simplistic narratives. It challenges conventional migration maps and asylum procedures, asking us to rethink the ways in which we represent and engage with these journeys.

We were not allowed to show anyone's faces, and we can discuss the ethics of that – what this straightforward approach to ethics and representation really achieves. For me, it was crucial to consider how the humanity of the individuals we were depicting could still be conveyed. That hand gesture captured something essential, but for those familiar with South Asian contexts, there was also the fabric of her sleeves – a thin lawn material – which immediately evokes home. Details like these connect us to who this person is beyond their anonymized representation.

Before we play the film, which runs for just ten minutes, I want to highlight some of the key themes it explores. The film addresses the question of circulation and the unsettlement produced by borders. It examines the temporalities of borders, considering colonial time, the time of brokerage, and the persistent present in which many displaced people exist. It also delves into precarious labour and the ways in which individuals navigate these conditions.

Professor Ben Highmore: Thank you, Nish, for your moving and poetic insights. Following that is a challenge, so instead, I will pick up on this notion of settlement and unsettlement. My examples come from North Kensington, just beyond the South Kensington location of the Royal College of Art.

Settlement, as a term, often functions as a euphemism for unsettlement. Josie mentioned the townships of South Africa, officially referred to as "informal settlements" despite their instability. In my own work on playgrounds, which focuses on the 1950s-70s, this period is often called the "postwar settlement." However, I want to illustrate how unsettled this time truly was. The so-called settlement between capital and labor – where the Conservative Party accepted a managed economy and the Labour Party refrained from pushing for full socialism – was always precarious and destined to unravel upon closer examination.

Walter Benjamin offers a compelling perspective on revolution, quoting Marx: "Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history, but perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on the train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake." This reframing suggests that what we traditionally perceive as revolutionary disruption is, in fact, the very nature of capitalism itself – unceasing instability.

North Kensington in the mid-20th century epitomized this instability. Although often referred to as Notting Hill, one of my informants noted, "Notting Hill is the name of a film. North Kensington is the name of a place." The area is commonly associated with Roger Main's photographs of Southam Street, depicting children and young adults playing in the streets. These images, taken for the New Left Review, aimed to highlight deprivation but instead capture an undeniable vitality.

During this period, North Kensington stood in stark contrast to its affluent neighbor, South Kensington. The borough of Kensington and Chelsea encapsulated what Marxists describe as "uneven development": extreme wealth disparity within a small geographic area. South Kensington housed some of London's wealthiest residents, while North Kensington suffered from overcrowding and substandard housing. In the Golborne ward, for instance, the highest level of overcrowding in Europe was recorded, with over 40% of residences accommodating more than one and a half people per room, including living and dining spaces.

The conditions were exacerbated by exploitative slum landlords, who charged exorbitant rates for unlivable accommodations. Compounding this hardship was the racial composition of the community. Viewing this postwar era through the lens of immigrant communities rather than traditional labour history unsettles the narrative of stability. Racism was rampant, culminating in the 1958 Notting Hill Riots. These events did not occur spontaneously but were fueled by the actions of organized fascist groups such as the White Defense League and Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, both intent on sowing division.

Beyond overcrowding, poor housing, and racial tensions, another significant disruption was the construction of the Westway. This major infrastructure project led to the demolition of entire communities, further fracturing an already precarious social fabric. The supposed postwar "settlement" was anything but; it was a time of continuous displacement, contestation, and struggle.

So, within this kind of period, you have lots of forces of disruption, lots of forces producing some of the worst conditions that you've got. How that affected children was particularly evident.

For instance, people looked at the difference between what was happening in South Kensington and what was happening in North Kensington. In South Kensington, a single child shared one-tenth of an acre with nine other children. In North Kensington, the same area was shared with 89 other children. This highlights the extraordinary differences in the provision of wealth and spatial resources.

The same thing was true with housing. There’s one street in Cavill Gardens where, in 1967, a street of nine houses had 72 tenancies, amounting to 210 people living in these nine houses. Among them were 72 children. The gardens for these houses were blocked off with barbed wire, preventing children from playing in them. The gardens in many of the squares in these Georgian areas were locked, barricaded, and overgrown, making them inaccessible. As a result, children had to play in the streets.

We saw them in Roger Mayne’s photographs. What we don’t see in those images are the children getting run over, the children being arrested by police simply for being outside, for being in a “non-place.” One of the things that emerged at this time was the idea of the city itself as an agent in criminalizing young people, especially young Black boys, who made up a disproportionately high percentage of juvenile court cases.

In South Kensington, there was public space available for children, and many had access to private gardens. In North Kensington, not only were private gardens nonexistent, but there was also an extreme lack of public space.

This was the context in which a politics of play emerged, and this is what interests me. In conditions of strife, people come together and campaign. North Kensington, during this time, saw an extraordinary number of community action groups. Some of these included:

• The Notting Hill People’s Association
• The North Kensington Play Space Group
• The Project Organizing Committee
• The Notting Hill Community Workshop
• The New Left Club
• The London Free School
• Various tenants’ associations
• The West London Anti-Fascist Youth Committee
• The Afro-Asian Club
• The Association for the Advancement of Colored People
• The Colored People’s Progressive Association

And many more. There was a splintering of groups, but one of the things that united them was play, which became a powerful force for community action.

The Notting Hill Adventure Playground was established in 1959 to challenge racist narratives and create a space for children. However, it was also an embattled space. It was surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and chain-link fencing – not to keep children in, but to keep others out, including the police and welfare officers, who often assumed stolen goods were hidden there. The playworkers were adamant that the playground was a safe space, and it became a beacon for the area, serving as a model for other initiatives.

Community coalitions also formed around children’s safety. Many children were being killed by cars as their neighborhoods were used as rat runs. Churches became involved, ringing their bells whenever a child was knocked down by a vehicle. This galvanized the community around the issue of spatial injustice, leading to campaigns to reclaim land for play. One significant success was the council’s purchase of Powis Square Gardens. However, there was an attempt to tarmac it over and turn it into a conventional playground, which sparked another wave of resistance.

Another example of play as activism occurred in 1968 and 1969 with the “Summer of Play” initiative. In 1968, 200 student volunteers were brought in to transform the area into a vast playground. Streets used as rat runs were reclaimed as play streets, demonstrating how play could be a radical act of reclaiming public space.

These coalitions also extended their efforts beyond play, forming stronger and more effective housing associations and tenant groups to fight for better living conditions.

The Notting Hill Adventure Playground secured a permanent site in 1966, with a purpose-built structure designed for play. The building itself was interactive – children could climb onto the roof, slide off it, and engage in various indoor activities. These playgrounds were designed to be places where children could spend entire summers or weekends making things and creating space.

The Westway also became a major site of activism. Many in North Kensington saw its construction as an intrusive act that would never have been allowed in a wealthier area. Major roads like these were built in areas where authorities cared little about the displacement of communities. However, residents reclaimed the undercroft of the motorway, turning it into a space for adventure playgrounds, summer schools, and other community-driven activities. The plan was to transform the entire area under the Westway into community-oriented spaces.

So, if we think about postwar settlement, we see capitalism as a destructive and unsettling force. That street of nine houses, once home to 270 people in cramped and precarious conditions, is now an area where a two-bedroom flat costs around £2 million. This kind of unsettling is what capitalism does – it disrupts communities.

At the same time, we must also recognize what happens when communities respond to these disruptions. They create new forms of settlement, new ways of using space. The improvised playgrounds may not have lasted forever, but some, like the Notting Hill Adventure Playground, still exist today. They represent a form of makeshift utopia – something that points to the potential for living differently and using space differently.

These examples remind us of what Raymond Williams described as an “ethics of hope.” He said, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Today, it is all too easy to succumb to despair. However, we have an ethical obligation to rescue moments of hope and possibility and potentiality from our chronic present. Thank you.

Q&As

Melanie Jackson: You so just wanted to say thank you so much for the presentations. There were some wonderful resonances and synchronicities, as well as talking about very different periods of time, temporalities, and locations. Josie and I thought that for the first kind of question, it would be nice actually to invite you both to respond to each other. The whole point was to put you in discussion—literally to put you in discussion—before you invite our interventions or the audience's. Would you like to say anything about each other's presentations?

Nishat Awan: Yeah, I thought your last image was really interesting. I mean, I'm an architect by training, and a lot of the work that I've been doing with others, of course, has been about trying to think about architecture beyond the built object. So, those images that you had of the Westway next to the playground... I co-wrote a book a long time ago called Spatial Agency, which is absolutely about this idea of how people produce space through social relations. I was like, "Oh, God, we should have had that in our book," because it was the perfect kind of example of a different way of thinking about architecture.

Because I do work on migration, really, it’s that way of thinking about architecture through spatial relations that I've really been trying to work with. So, yeah, that’s what I found really striking right at the end.

Ben Highmore: Thank you. Um, yes, I think kind of architectural thinking is part of what I was kind of interested in. I mean, for me, one of the things that I really found something really emphatic in your work – the sound. The sound is because it cuts out at some point, that kind of drone, that kind of thing, and then when it comes back in, it's really, really affecting and really very atmospheric, but also very, very sinister. It sets up this kind of – I mean, I'm very interested in the whole poetics of your work, which is very strong, and how that relates to what you're talking about, you know, the topic.

Nishat Awan: It's really interesting, but for Strangers, I wrote the text for that film in just one go. It was after I'd been doing a lot of work in Pakistan and in Turkey. COVID had just happened, so we couldn't go and do fieldwork anymore, and I was just feeling so full of these stories yet unable to write the standard kind of academic text – not able to really reflect on anything. It was a way of just somehow getting out a lot of the very difficult stories that I'd heard, the kind of emotion. So I guess it just came through in a way that I'm not really able to pick apart, as it were. But yeah, it was kind of weird for me too.

Josie Kane: So thanks both so much for your presentations. They're so provocative, in the good sense. My mind is just pinging off all of these ideas, but I keep coming back to a similar question, a similar perspective. In both your related yet very different ways, you're attempting to uncover some aspects of the eclipsed, the forgotten, the improper – the makeshift, the everyday – with a particular agenda, ultimately, one might think.

Ben, at the end of your talk, you had this lovely phrase, "talking back to spatial injustice to make another world, with another model." I'm very curious about how, in a sense, you understand your process, your method, your mission – if you want – and how that then reflects back onto yourself. Where do you stand vis-à-vis the subjects, the histories, the lives that you're researching and articulating? You're not necessarily directly a part of them – or are you?

It's a question about positionality, but also about your real intention in focusing on the often-obscured, the vulnerable, the minoritized, the displaced, and so forth. Because you both focus on the visual in your work, that's why I'm very interested.

Ben Highmore: Yes, I mean, I think I was very aware of that. I mean, partly because I think cultural studies, the humanities, really veer between either heavy critique or a kind of prizing, saying, "This is absolutely fantastic!" And I was very struck by how easy it is to be drawn to that – to praise and say, "These things are fantastic, they need funding," and withdrawing the funding from them is terrible.

But at the same time, I really wanted to hang on to a kind of dialectic. Saying to a city, "We're going to get a discrete bit of space here, and kids are going to be safe in this. They're not going to be run over, they're not going to be arrested, they're not going to be criminalized" – that wasn’t a cure. That doesn’t solve spatial injustice. In fact, it’s a kind of temporary amelioration.

But then you could also think, well, actually, that just adds to the problem – the problem of seeing the city as a hostile environment for children, and it kind of plays into that. Now, sometimes amelioration, or a kind of Band-Aid, a sticking plaster on things, is necessary. It's better than nothing. So it's about keeping in mind the bigger picture: the city is criminalizing young people, especially young Black boys in particular.

One aspect of this was the idea of a walled space, a carceral space. When they built the new Notting Hill adventure playground, there were concrete walls eight feet high, with another four feet of chain-link fence around the top. It couldn’t look more like somewhere impossible to escape from. But one of the things that comes out of that is that people can produce new kinds of intimacy within that space.

Yet, you're getting a lot of radical architects saying, "Oh my God, having walls and chain-link fences is the worst possible thing you could have." This was put to various play workers, and they said, "Yeah, you're probably right. We shouldn't have chain-link fences. But if it comes to the point where we don’t need chain-link fences, we won’t need adventure playgrounds either."

Question: So then, how do you understand your work of uncovering these histories? You have a real attention to what might be seen as something like wallpaper – the work on Brixton or small, temporary playgrounds. How do you see the work of recovery and articulation? How does that relate to politics?

Ben Highmore: I suppose that’s always been the work I’ve done – recovering minor things, the overlooked, the undervalued. Putting them into the foreground, I think, has a politics of its own. Maybe it’s an aesthetic politics of just changing the focus of things.

For me, it's a politics of neither total critique on one hand nor an easy celebration on the other. It’s about trying to tell these stories well, being as true to the people involved as possible. Not trying to ventriloquize on their behalf, but actually giving those stories the space and time they need – without necessarily being judgmental, but allowing them to have their own articulation, their own politics.

Melanie Jackson: Do you ever work with the subjects you're writing about? I'm interested in the texture of that discourse, the subjectivity, the positionality.

Ben Highmore: Yes, I do. Though because my work is historical, I talk to people who were involved, but not necessarily directly. However, I am involved in playgrounds that exist now where I live. But that’s more about activism, I guess.

Nishat Awan: One thing I would say about migration discourse is that the figure of the migrant is actually overexposed. It's everywhere – in the media, in academic circles. So, in many ways, we’re dealing with an overrepresented figure. My interest is in: how do you tell a different story? And how do you tell it from a different position?

Of course, I moved to the UK as a migrant, but I wasn’t an undocumented migrant. So for me, there’s something about telling stories from the South. There’s a whole discourse on the autonomy of migration, which is about giving agency to the people crossing borders. It argues that people make decisions to go on these journeys, rather than just being caught in border regimes.

I do agree with that, but much of that activist literature comes from a European perspective. When you move away from Europe and look from the South – from Pakistan, in my case – different stories emerge. The same stories, but with a different flavor. That was really important to me in terms of positionality.

Of course, I have a British passport, so I’m highly privileged. That privilege marks every conversation I have. How could it not? I usually have a map of our research team, which is spread across the UK, Europe, Pakistan, India, and Turkey. I show the lines of migration journeys, but then also our privilege lines – which are loops, because we’ve traveled by flights.

That privilege underscores every conversation.

Question from the audience: Thank you, Nishat and Ben. Ben, a question for you, or maybe it's part observation. I was really struck by, I don't know if it's your quotation of yourself, but Notting Hill is the name of a film, and North Kensington is the name of a place. And this was in relation to that series of Roger M photographs. I was thinking of the film Notting Hill, and I remember a film from 1988, I think, called Absolute Beginners, which was based on a book by Colin McKinnis, written in 1959, which has as one of its sort of centerpieces the so-called Notting Hill riots. And I saw the image from Michael Putland, which looks cinematic. Was that a documentary image? Because it looks as if it's on a film set, the one with the Trader Horn shop.

Ben Highmore: I don't know about that. Yeah, it does. I mean, it does look like it's staged, doesn't it? The lighting is incredible. Interestingly, you mention Absolute Beginners. The first cover of Absolute Beginners had a photograph by Roger M, the same photographer, kind of making those of the kind of young woman in the street. But yes, I mean, that's the kind of difficult thing, isn't it? We're so mediatized, we've had so many layers of mediation now. I think if you were hanging around in the 1950s and '60s, Notting Hill would have been a perfectly fine phrase to use, as with Notting Dale. It would have talked about particular places. The person who made that comment is the photographer Adam Richie, who took a lot of the kind of... he was very involved with the kind of Play Space group and was that kind of undercroft of the Westway. And he's making the point that this Richard Curtis film has ruined that term. We can't use the word Notting Hill in the same way because of something like that film. And I think that's an interesting thing around mediation.

Thank you. Sorry. Yes, I have a practical question. How do the communities where people migrate, how do they document it? Do they have archives? Are there records kept, "This family moved away," or how is this recorded? Did you find any insight into that?

Nishat Awan: I'm looking at very contemporary migrations, right? So people moving right now. People are caught in this kind of circulation. A lot of the people I've spoken to come from a very particular place in Pakistan, the Punjab Province, and a particular place called the migration triangle, the Gat triangle. So it's Garat and some other small towns, and for some reason, a lot of people from this place try to make their way, especially to the UK. In many ways, it's not that there's a community space or anything, but the stories come back because people are deported, they come, they try again. That particular place, if you go there, there's a whole contemporary history of migration. People speak a very particular version of Urdu and Greek mixed together, which is quite funny to hear. The culture is changing. There's a very different style of housing there because the ones who did make it are sending remittances back. It's changing the landscape there. There probably will eventually be an archive, but for now, it's very much an oral tradition. There are certain places where a lot of the young men have left. It's usually young men – 99.9% are men – and they tend to be teenagers, between 15 and early 20s. Older people don't do it anymore because the journey is very difficult. You will often speak to people where one son has gone, maybe lost their life, and rather than getting compensation from the agent, they send the next child along. These very difficult situations have emerged. In another presentation, I speak a lot about this idea of displacement. We think of displacement as long journeys of migration, but in these places, displacement is happening without moving. It's happening from these situations, but also from the effects of climate change, industrial expansion, and degradation of the city of Lahore, which is expanding fast into these village areas. The degradation of the environment is producing slow violence, essentially. This kind of ecological breakdown is producing large-scale migrations.

Question from the audience: I have a question. My question is kind of strange because I arrived late, so I didn't actually see the video, which was really sad. I've had this strange experience where I've just been hearing more and more about it without having seen it. I guess, one, is it published anywhere? Does it live anywhere online? Are you going to show it anywhere else?

Nishat Awan: We're showing it at the UCL UR room, not tomorrow night, but the night after. I'm doing a presentation in the evening. You're welcome. But otherwise, it's not available, but I can give you a link and a password if you want to see it.

Audience member: That would be amazing. It also made me think about, as you said, there's a lot of academia and writing about migration studies, and this over-represented figure of the migrant. I'd love to hear a bit about what you think visualising all this research does, and whether that different mode kind of changes the representation of the migrant figure.

Nishat Awan: One of the reasons the film is the way it is is because it doesn't show anyone. No migrants are ever shown. You see landscapes, you see animated bits of film. The narration puts you almost in the space of the person who's moving, sometimes not always. But you do sometimes see somebody working in a workshop on the outskirts of Able, for example, and that could be somebody who's a migrant or not, so you don't really know. Partly, that was because, as I mentioned in the talk, the ethics is part of this large-scale European project that I was doing. It comes with very heavy ethical guidelines from the hard sciences that are adopted into arts and humanities. They're okay, but they restrict you in many ways. They're very black-and-white in the way they consider ethics. For example, you're never allowed to show the face of anyone. Some images are of hands, etc. It produces its own problems because not showing faces can dehumanise people sometimes. It's difficult. Often, people would say, "Well, tell my name, tell my story," and you're like, "I can't."

Question: So, will the film be available publicly at some point?

Nishat Awan: I should put it online. The website has not been updated for so long. I've run out of money, essentially.

Josie Kane: It's interesting that questions of everyday life and how they inform critique also inform scholarship and the types of work we're all engaged in, in ways that feel increasingly overbearing. It might be possible to say. It's good just to have that as a point of conclusion. Also, thinking about ways to take back space, referring to pulling down fences or making claims to certain freedoms. But it's perilous, a perilous navigation. Mel, I don't know if you want to say any final remarks?

Mel Jackson: No, I think, well, I suppose one question I have is, given the limitations on representation that you had, is there another film you want to make as an artist who isn't, you know, who's free to take more liberties with those institutional ethical guidelines? That's kind of interesting to me. Do you want to show faces? Do you want to tell stories now, or do you think that those restrictions have provided an identification that we have to do the work?

Nishat Awan: I think the latter, actually. We have all the stories of migrants. Partly, I'm trying not to make this a long answer, but I had disillusionment with the NGO narrative, the standard way in which migrants are shown. At the same time, within architecture, there's this evidentiary turn – forensic architecture, those kinds of worlds where everything is about statistics and what's happening. I wanted to find something else. Somehow, these restrictions allowed me to do something that I feel okay about, actually.

Mel Jackson: Thank you so much. Really enjoyed what this has opened up. Thank you.