Film-maker, broadcaster and historian David Olusoga will be joined by journalist and BBC presenter Razia Iqbal for a University discussion (21 October) on the Windrush immigration scandal.
Titled “We Need to Talk About Windrush”, the event will take place at 6pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 1 on the Canterbury campus. It is free and open to all.
The discussion, which is the first in a new series of public talks launched by Kent’s School of English, will address Black history in Britain, the Windrush scandal, which came to light in 2018, and UK Home Office’s ‘hostile environment policy’, which was announced in 2012.
Dr Bashir Abu-Manneh, the event organiser and Reader in Postcolonial Literature, said: ‘I am delighted that David and Razia are leading this important discussion. The Windrush scandal exposed the brutal workings of the government’s hostile environment policy and its terrible and on-going human costs. I would encourage and welcome anyone with an interest not just in Windrush, or the experiences of Black British immigrants, but the experience of immigrants everywhere to join us for what promises to be a thought-provoking evening.’
David Olusoga, is a broadcaster, film-maker and one of the UK’s foremost historians whose main subject areas are empire, race and slavery. As well as his TV work, which includes presenting the BBC’s landmark series Civilizations in 2018, Professor Olusoga is an award-winning author. His books include Civilizations: Encounters and the Cult of Progress, The World’s War, which won First World War Book of the Year, Black & British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, and The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. He also writes for The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman and BBC History Magazine. He is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester.
Razia Iqbal is a presenter for BBC News. She is one of the main hosts of Newshour, the flagship news and current affairs programme on BBC World Service radio. She also regularly presents The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and the history programme, Witness on the BBC news channel and BBC World TV. She was the BBC’s arts correspondent for a decade and has worked as a political reporter, and as a foreign correspondent in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. She has worked for the BBC for nearly three decades.
The English Public Keynotes series aims to spark public discussion about crucial intellectual and political questions today. For further information go here.