Temi is an advocate for marginalised Black communities. She focuses on fighting against institutional racism and is passionate about building a world where we use a radically different approach to resolving conflict within society. Temi has discussed the importance of grassroots organising at a roundtable with the Obama Foundation. Temi has appeared in front of the Home Affairs Select Committee to give expert evidence about institutional racism in the police. She was part of the ministerial roundtable that examined serious youth violence.

She has worked with Mexican institutions to consult on their "Building Movements, Tackling Violence" strategy. Temi was one of sixty change makers from across the world selected to participate in the 10th UNESCO Youth Forum. She was asked to consider how UNESCO can support and amplify the voices of young people who are actively engaged in peace-building across the world and presented these recommendations at the 39th UNESCO General Conference to representatives from across the world.

Temi has been a commentator on numerous outlets, including The Today Programme, Sunday Politics, Channel 4 News, Sky News, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, as well as being featured in Vogue and Elle. She has spoken about racial equity at various universities and companies.

Temi’s work at The 4Front Project is changing the way that people understand how to support young people who have been affected by violence.

Temi grew up on Grahame Park Estate in North West London. It was her early experiences of injustice that formed her primary motivation to create change. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she was a High Spen Scholar. During her studies, she sought to bridge the gap between the academic theory and grassroots movements.

Maisha Riyah is an MA student in Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity at Birkbeck University of London. Her research will examine racialised and marginalised communities in the UK and their relation to colonialism and imperialism. Topics such as race and British imperialism are often brushed over rather quickly, which dismisses their significance in understanding the society and world that we live in today. She is keen to contribute to the work of Bonnart Trust and to continue tackling the intolerance and prejudice that different groups continuously experience.

Maisha completed her BA in Politics and International Relations (IR) from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2021, specialising in global politics and decolonising the curriculum in IR. Her undergraduate dissertation focused on decolonising the curriculum and how it contributes to a global International Relations. The research primarily used qualitative data to analyse both students and academics views on both campaigns. One of the main themes she discusses in this dissertation is about the notion of the colonisation of knowledge, which tends to be dominated by the West, and how this contributes to the absence of non-Western voices in academia, especially in a subject like International Relations.

Her paper aimed to highlight the voices of both students and academics (from Politics and IR departments) on their thoughts on decolonising the curricula and whether we need to rethink about adapting IR into becoming more global. Following the completion of her BA, she spent two years working for Royal Holloway and a year working in a Sixth form/secondary school teaching Politics and History.

Currently, she works full time as a Peer Support Co-ordinator under the Haringey Wellbeing Network service for the mental health charity Mind in Haringey, managing and leading the development and delivery of two models of peer support services. Her roles include recruitment, training, managing, supervising, and supporting volunteers to deliver a 1-2-1 coaching service and peer support group hubs (https://www.mindinharingey.org.uk/our-services/haringey-wellbeing-network/peer-support-services/). The aim of this charity is to seek influence and improve mental health services in Haringey, raising awareness and challenging stigma and discrimination including racialised communities to receive support and access to mental health and educate about the importance of mental health issues.

Maisha would like to increase awareness about the colonial history and deep-rooted structural racism that has strongly affected marginalised communities with their mental health and the prevalence of generational trauma that has been passed down to the younger generations.

In her spare time, Maisha enjoys outdoor activities, walking and café hopping and trying out different countries’ cuisines and loves reading and films.

Rebecca (Bex) Shorunke is an MA student in Culture, Diaspora and Ethnicity at Birkbeck College, University of London. She began her studies in October 2021 and is interested in understanding the histories and discourses that have contributed to the construction of identity categories such as ‘race’ and ‘gender’ and their psychosocial legacies and capacity to be reframed or reinvented.

She is also interested in how we can use intersectional frameworks to better understand how marginalised communities are treated by the police, welfare agencies and the criminal justice system, whilst acknowledging the capacity for communities to support themselves and each other, outside of the state.

Bex completed her BA in English Literature at the University of Manchester in 2016. Her dissertation focused on the representation of African American women in poetry and prose in the seventies and eighties, and their use of the arts as an act of resistance to racist and sexist attitudes of the time. Following graduation, she worked at arts publishers and continued to build her portfolio in freelance journalism.

She writes about intersectionality, social welfare, homelessness, and culture and has written about issues such as FGM, portrayals of blackness in the arts and the deportation of asylum seekers for Inside Housing, Stylist, Gal-dem, Dazed, Time Out, Stonewall and more.

Up until November 2021 Bex was working at the LGBTQ+ youth homelessness charity Akt (formerly the Albert Kennedy Trust) to raise public awareness into LGBTQ+ youth homelessness and its wrap-around themes. These include racism, gender-based violence, mental health, substance misuse, sex work and trauma. She now manages the media, press and PR at Mermaids, a charity supporting trans and non-binary children, young people and their families. Through well-placed media, political campaigns and advocacy work she is platforming the experiences of trans young people and challenging the anti-trans rhetoric that is so pervasive in the government and wider society. In her spare time, Bex enjoys reading, documentaries, theatre and Crossfit.

Aleph Ross is an MA student in Contemporary History and Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, 2021-2023. She currently works part time for a charity supporting unpaid carers and has an interest in the history of social reproduction and the hidden or neglected work of care, domestic and sexual labour. She is also curious about the absorption of this work into the welfare state, and the role of feminist groups, trade unions and charities in shaping how gendered labor is performed and paid for.

Meanwhile, she has developed a growing curiosity in Jewish migration to London in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is eager to explore the points of overlap between this period of history and the feminist and gender histories with which she is most familiar (e.g. the role of friendly societies in funding and organising care-work in the East End). One day a week, she also works as a cheesemonger in an outdoor market and is involved in organising with the community union ACORN.

(The Bonnart Trust UCL Endowed Fund)

David’s ethnographic research investigates how practices of security affect and are affected by the question of where we and others belong. The relation seems rather worrying: Various endeavours supposedly aimed at enhancing our security, such as anti-terrorist measures, have notoriously produced categories of undesired people and at times with lethal consequences. But cannot security be done differently? We should not forget that security is a cultural phenomenon; it is not the same thing across (and even within) different cultural and historical contexts, and we can learn from those other “possibilities of being”. Focusing on the experience of queer people in Georgia as creative agents of security (rather than mere passive victims of hate crimes), David is particularly interested in whether non-dominant understandings and practices of security can escape the violent and exclusivist logic the concept is infamous for.

That is, if the prevalent conception of security is the problem, perhaps there are ways to queer it. This way, he simultaneously contributes towards filling the gap in research on queerness in Georgia (and Eastern Europe in general) and furthers our understanding of queer (in)security beyond victimology.

Before joining UCL SSEES, David received an MSc in Social Sciences (Research) from the University of Amsterdam and an Mgr in Security & Strategic Studies from Masaryk University.

Jennifer is a PhD student in History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on contemporary graffiti in sites of the Holocaust. She is interested in individual acts of resistance against the Nazi regime, how prisoners and guards interacted with the built environment around them, and unconventional forms of communication. She will document and catalogue the graffiti herself, creating a template that can be used at other sites of imprisonment and genocide.

Jennifer received an MA in Modern History and Politics from Birkbeck College as the Eric Hobsbawm scholar for the 2019–2020 class. Her dissertation focused on the mail system in Auschwitz, comparing the official rules against the lived experiences of prisoners. She also has an MPhil in Linguistics from Trinity College Dublin, writing a dissertation entitled “Critical Discourse Analysis & Graffiti: A Case Study of Prisoner Number Graffiti in Auschwitz I”. Her BA is in Literature and Languages from Loyola University Chicago.

Her wider research interests include modern graffiti, comparative genocide research, philately, Jewish history, Cuban history, and resistance movements. Jennifer speaks four languages – Polish, French, Spanish, and English – and is learning two more – Yiddish and German.