Minds on the Move: Migration in the modern world

All around us, buildings are ageing. The city we inhabit is largely made of structures built in the mid-twentieth century, quietly approaching the end of their designed lives. They require care: repair, maintenance, the slow work of keeping things going. When that care takes the form of large-scale climate retrofit, I ask what it does to the people inside. As an anthropologist, I've spent a decade studying what happens when homes are transformed: in Romania's socialist-era blocks of flats, and now in Lewisham's social housing. What does housing tell us about care and belonging, and what does climate retrofit risk getting wrong when it treats homes as technical problems rather than lived places?

How do we make sense of our ethnic identity and what does language have to do with it? Using the concept of meaning as something unstable and its relationship with context, this talk will explore how ethnicity is understood in Latin America versus the UK, and how these differences influence the identities of first and second-generation migrants. This will be explored through stories about growing up in Colombia without an awareness of a sense of ethnicity, moving to London and being asked about it consistently, and the curiosity about shaping an identity when growing up as a second generation.