Love as Resistance: unbordered humanity

How do we lift up the pockets of love and joy, belonging and connection - the power of lives lived in spite of, and challenging, division?

In an increasingly brutal landscape where migration is demonised and basic human rights diminished at the altar of ethno-nationalist agendas, it’s easy for overwhelming oppression to remain the full focus. We must, after all, not rest, lest more lives are lost. But how do we celebrate resilience while refusing to accept injustice and continuing to fight?

In This is Also a Love Story, journalist Sally Hayden looks at the world of violent borders she’s reported on during her career, but through the lens of actions taken out of love. She is joined by Tawona Sitholé and Alison Phipps, co-authors of Folding a River - a sweeping poetic testament to migration, memory and the fragile work of hope - for a conversation about resistance, movement and the reality of living in this world as humans, which is never just about despair.

This event also includes an introduction from ECHO - a multilingual mobile library working out of Athens, Greece.

Our Speakers:

Sally Hayden is an award-winning author, photographer and journalist.

This Is Also a Love Story: Searching for Good in a Divided World is her second book, published in May 2026. Her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route, won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, among others.

She was named overall 'journalist of the year' at the Irish Journalism Awards in 2023 and 2025, and is currently based in Lebanon.

Alison Phipps holds the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts and is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow. As well as working as an academic she also writes poetry. Her most recent collection, Folding a River (Wild Goose Publications 2026), is jointly written and devised from research undertaken across many countries, with her colleague Dr Tawona Sithole. She is a member of the Iona Community and draws much inspiration from her allotment.

Tawona Sitholé: My spirit name, ganyamatopé dzapasi, inspires me in shared creativity and learning. I am a lecturer in Creative Practice Education within the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts, University of Glasgow. co-founder, Seeds of Thought arts group; mostly i appreciate my work for the many inspiring people it allows me to meet.

Our chair:

Ravideep Kaur is a poet, facilitator and dreamer with a walking-based practice that centres on the living world, spirit, somatics and disruption. Rooted in her own ancestral history and wisdom she’s interested in the cultivation of communal spaces across and beyond their designated binaries. A mother of three - she’s dedicated to notions of nurturing which de-stabilise hierarchies of power, instead, inviting tender embodiment and grounding rituals to complicate normative ways of thinking and being with each other. Her writing lives between the intersections of identity, memory, language & reclamation. She is often found frolicking near a large body of water.