CHP Seminar - Nikita Simpson
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Title: Hostile Environments: The Intersections of Housing, Migration and Mental Health Policy in the UK and Beyond - A film screening and conversation.
Teams link: https://go.unimelb.edu.au/uc3p
Location: Seminar 516, Level 5, 207 Bouverie Street, Carlton
Bio: Nikita Simpson is a Reader in Anthropology and the Co-Director of the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action. She conducts ethnographic research and policy advisory on mental health and inequality in India, the UK and Australia. Her research has been published in a range of venues including the BMJ Global Health, Medical Anthropology Quarterly and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Her forthcoming manuscript titled, Tension: Mental health and embodied inequality in the Western Himalayas, is forthcoming with Duke University Press’ Critical Global Health series in March 2026.
Abstract: The UK Government Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy is a set of administrative and legislative measures aimed at making it difficult for migrants to stay in Britain. Over more than a decade, this approach has combined securitised practices of bordering and policing, with housing and mental health policies which have defunded and hollowed out provisioning at community level. This seminar, which includes the premiere of a short film, draws attention to the materiality of this hostile environment as it is experienced in the mouldy and damp homes of Somali families who inhabit temporary or precarious accommodation in Birmingham. Drawing on interdisciplinary (clinical, geographic, psychological, and ethnographic) fieldwork, we reveal how Somali families experiencing ‘homelessness’ are placed, by local authorities, in overcrowded, private and temporary accommodations of varying states of disrepair. It explores the ways in which housing, migration, and mental health policy intersect to generate distress in the UK and in Australia. It puts forward the case for attention to property - access, tenure, quality and security - as a means of addressing mental health inequalities.