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2025 MRG Annual Lecture

Please join us for our annual lecture. The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Encounters with kindness: everyday and extraordinary kind interventions in the lives of forced migrant survivors of sexual and gender based violence

Professor Jenny Phillimore, University of Birmingham

Very many forced migrants are subject to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) with studies showing that victimisation causes women and girls wide-ranging harms. Less is known about the actions and experiences that enable forced migrants to be protected from, or cope in the aftermath of, violence. In this talk, I examine forced migrants’ accounts of kind encounters with strangers who made a difference to their lives in many different ways. Using narrations drawn from 166 semi-structured interviews with forced migrant SGBV survivors I will talk about the nature of kind encounters, the contexts in which they occur, and the impact that encounters with kindness have on the lives of survivors of SGBV. Kindness is encountered across forced migration journeys and ranges from the extraordinary to the everyday. Kind encounters offer vital help and support which sometimes saves lives. Kindness can connect people across cleavages while fostering resistance against degrading practices. The significance that survivors attach to kind encounters highlights gaps in humanitarian protection and the normalization of cruelty towards forced migrants but it also shows the potential for kindness to offer hope and healing in difficult times.

Professor Phillimore is Professor of Migration and Superdiversity, Honorary Doctor and Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Commissioner on the Commission on the Integration of Refugees and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She was Founding Director of IRiS and a member of the UK’s REF. She co-authored the UK’s Indicators of Integration for Refugees and has advised governments in five continents on refugee integration. Phillimore is a Social Policy Analyst specialising in integration policy but working and publishing across multiple disciplines. She has run several large-scale international mixed methods projects. She has published over 30 articles on refugees and integration. She led the RJ funded SEREDA project and is currently in receipt of a Leverhulme Major Fellowship for which she is writing a book on violence harm and refugee integration. Research interests include access to social welfare in superdiverse areas with a particular focus on refugees, migrants and gender (articles Critical Social Policy, Journal of Refugee Studies, BMJ International, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Urban Studies).