[GenSeM Migration Dialogue] "Walking with Afghan women" - 19 June 2026

[GenSeM Migration Dialogue] This is the recording of the GenSeM Migration Dialogue, which took place online on 19 June 2026. The event was chaired by GenSeM co-chair Dr Sinem Yilmaz and featured the presentation by Professor Louise Ryan, Professor Maria Lopez and Mursal Rasa, who discussed their recent paper: 'Walking with Afghan Women: Using Mobile Methods to Understand Differentiated Embedding within Different Places across England'. This paper draws upon data from research with Afghans who have been recently resettled across varied sites in England. Focusing on the accounts of resettled Afghan women, we seek to advance understanding of how, in the context of resettlement, they navigate embedding in particular places – including large, multi-ethnic cities and smaller, less diverse towns and villages in England. To inform this understanding, we adopt mobile methods, in particular walking interviews, across these different geographical locations. As we walk around their neighbourhoods, the women narrate their everyday experiences and forms of agency within these places. The paper examines the extent to which they feel welcome and supported in their new locations or if they face hostility. Focusing on places as socially constructed through interactions over time, we explore relationality, socio-cultural structures and power dynamics within these localities. The racist riots across various English regions during the summer of 2024 emerge as a specific theme in women’s accounts, undermining their feelings of safety and threatening to unsettle nascent embedding. Thus, our paper aims to shed new light on the fragile and processual nature of embedding, but also how it is actively negotiated, through mobilising resources (capital), within specific temporal and spatial contexts.