Refugees and COVID-19 – Newcastle University

This research dissemination animation, titled “Refugees and COVID-19”, was commissioned by Professor Peter Hopkins at Newcastle University and funded by the ESRC (grant ES/V015141/1). It draws on the project’s findings to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown affected refugees and asylum seekers in the UK.

When the country was told to stay home, many refugees and asylum seekers lost access to the support that held their lives together. English classes, advice services, counselling and community groups moved online, but digital exclusion meant a lot of people had no reliable phone, computer or internet to reach them. The result, for many, was deeper isolation on top of hardships that long pre-dated the pandemic, something the research found hit single parents with young children and men who had been waiting years on their asylum claims especially hard.

The stories were fictionalised from the research and voiced by actors, a deliberate choice that let us stay true to the realities participants described while protecting their identities. As an empathic piece of research dissemination, the animation combines hand-drawn animation with 2D motion graphics and professional sound design. Turning rigorous social science into something a general audience can feel as well as understand is the heart of my animation work with academics and researchers.

The wider project was led by Professor Peter Hopkins with Dr Robin Finlay (now at Durham University) and Dr Matthew Benwell of Newcastle’s School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, drawing on a UK-wide survey of organisations supporting refugees alongside interviews in Glasgow and Newcastle-Gateshead. Their findings were published in the Newcastle University report “It’s like rubbing salt on the wound”: the impacts of COVID-19 and lockdown on asylum seekers and refugees. This film is one of three I made with the team, alongside “Refugee arrivals” and “Refugees and public space”.

If you’re a researcher or organisation working on migration, asylum, public health or social justice and you’d like to turn your research into animation, I’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.