Project Brief: 

We aim to see how the complex history of migration, governance and asylum has produced the cause and conditions for an increasingly diverse and ‘global’ Coventry in the post-war decades. What kind of factors have enabled such a convergence over the last five decades? what kind of diasporic formations have this produced, especially around race, ethnicity and religion? We take the Windrush and 9/11 as broad markers that define the time and space of our project. Our work, mainly collaborative in nature, will feed into larger histories of migration, mobility and diaspora in the U.K focusing largely on non-white immigrant communities.

This project will identify the different immigrant streams that currently constitute the city’s diverse populations – industrial labourers, students, (queer) asylum seekers – and document its overlapping narratives. It brings together historians, sociologists and community-based activists to reflect on immigrant identification and belonging in contemporary Coventry.

Project Leads:

Prof. Anne Gerritsen, Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick

Dr Somak Biswas, Institute of Historical Research, Univesity of London

Collaborative Partners:

Dr Saba Hussain, Coventry University

Coventry Asylum and Refugee Action Group

Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre

Queer Asia, UK

Foleshill Road, 1970s Coventry.
Courtesy: Modern Records Centre

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Funded by:

City of Culture, Coventry

Institute of Historical Research, London