SELMA
Project
Welcome to the virtual exhibition for the SELMA project, a cross-institutional, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary collaborative migration health project between University College London , UK, Aga Khan University, Pakistan, the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, and University of Bern, Switzerland.
Here, we invite you to explore the dynamic, complex and layered reality of migration and health guided by the voices and stories of migrants and refugees in Pakistan and the UK.
Over 272 million people currently live in a country other than that of their birth. Some move in search of better opportunities, for others extreme poverty, insecurity, natural disasters or war have driven them from their homes.
Our world is shaped by mobility, our societies contoured by it, and yet migration as a determinant of health remains troublingly understudied.
The SELMA project set out to understand what policies were in place to protect migrant/refugee health. Through the lens of two disparate migration health contexts; migrant, refugee and asylum systems in the UK, and male labour migration from Pakistan into the Gulf Cooperation Council, SELMA provides a rich and textured image of the structural drivers of health and the extent to which gender and gender norms shape the health and wellbeing of migrant and refugee communities.
The works presented in the following virtual exhibitions are the result of two lively public engagement projects run in Pakistan and the UK respectively. Through these exhibitions, we encourage you to see beyond the construction of migrants and refugees as reducible to their migratory status and to encounter the diverse and dynamic realities of migration.