From Migration to Resilience
Welcome to our monthly seminars that provide a platform for wider debate around equality, migration, resilience, identity, culture and heritage.
Our second seminar is on the theme of From Migration to Resilience and will held online via Zoom on Wednesday 21 February 2024, 5.00pm to 6.30pm.
Keynote speakers:
Our keynote speakers are authors Amrit Wilson and Bharti Dhir. Both will speak about their personal and professional experiences of ‘from migration to resilience’.
Amrit’s pioneering book ‘Finding a voice’ was first published in 1978 and won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year. Through discussions, interviews and one-to-one conversations with South Asian women conducted in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English, Amrit charted the lives of South Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain exploring family relationships, impact of migration, immigration policies and statutory service provision as well as the discrimination faced at work that led to women organising some of the most iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles.
The new edition of ‘Finding a voice’ includes historic photographs, and a new chapter titled ‘In conversation with Finding a Voice: 40 years on’ in which younger South Asian women write about their own experiences connecting with those portrayed in the original book.
Amrit will speak about how the multiple, often entangled, migration patterns to the UK whether directly from the Indian subcontinent or through previous migration to East Africa have impacted on class, caste, religious and wealth backgrounds of the South Asian communities.
Bharti’s book ‘Worth’ is her memoir as an African-Asian woman adopted into a Punjabi, Sikh family, and her story of overcoming racism, sexism, health problems and escaping Uganda in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled Asians.
Bharti will speak about her personal experiences of overcoming abandonment, discrimination, and adversity to find inner strength and self-worth to shape destiny.
About the speakers:
Amrit Wilson is an award-winning journalist and an activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and on South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and of ‘Awaaz’- a women’s collective that was at the forefront of the fight for Asian women’s rights in the 1970s and 1980s. Amrit’s pioneering book ‘Finding a voice’ was published in 1978 and captured Asian women’s experiences of love, marriage, relationships, friendships as well as of racism in housing, education and at the hands of the law.
Bharti Dhir is a qualified social worker, works in child protection and is the author of ‘Worth’ which is Bharti’s memoir as an African-Asian woman adopted into a Punjabi, Sikh family, and her story of overcoming racism, sexism, health problems and escaping Uganda in 1972 when Idi Amin expelled Asians. Bharti will speak about her personal experiences of overcoming abandonment, discrimination, and adversity to find inner strength and self-worth to shape destiny.
Please contact wahproject@rcahmw.gov.uk if you would like further information. Telephone: 01970 621 234
This talk will be delivered in English.
Tickets will be limited and must be booked in advance.
All talks will be recorded, becoming available in due course on the Royal Commission’s YouTube channel.