Management
The IRR is a registered charity and company limited by guarantee governed by a Council of Management, elected from the IRR membership and composed of people who share a concern about racism and a commitment to overcoming it. The day-to-day work is undertaken by staff with the help of Council members and volunteers – please see the volunteering for IRR webpage if you are interested in volunteering. The work of the IRR is supported from publication sales and by individual donations and grants from charitable trusts.
The members of the council of management are:
Chair, John Narayan
A lecturer at King’s College London whose research interests include racism and anti-racism, racial capitalism, globalisation and imperialism. He is also a member of the Editorial Working Committee for Race & Class. John, who was a key organiser of the IRR’s anniversary IRR50 conference held in Autumn 2022 is responsible for political education within IRR and has also helped develop education programmes for many organisations including Black Lives Matter.
Vice-chair, Joseph Maggs
Joseph is a pupil barrister at One Pump Court with a particular interest in criminal defence, immigration and housing. He completed a BA in History at UCL before converting to law, is a regular contributor to IRR News and Race & Class, and co-edits the Haldane Society’s Socialist Lawyer magazine. He has worked in campaigning and casework roles at various organisations including Liberty, SOAS Detainee Support and ATLEU, and regularly volunteers as a legal observer.
Treasurer, Lee Bridges
Emeritus Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. Prior to his emigration to the UK in 1968, he undertook empirical research on race and the criminal justice system. He has worked with the Institute of Race Relations for fifty years, including as a member of its Council and the Race & Class Editorial Working Committee, as well as a period in the 1980s and early 1990s when he was a member of staff. He has a history of overseeing/advising management in a number of voluntary sector organisations including The Legal Action Group, Statewatch, Stopwatch, which he co-founded, and the Public Law Project. As well as acting as Treasurer, Lee convenes the IRR’s Staff Welfare Committee.
Legal Advisor, Frances Webber
A former barrister who specialised in immigration, refugee and human rights law until her retirement in 2008, Frances is an honorary vice-president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and author of Borderline justice: the fight for refugee and migrant rights (Pluto, October 2012). With over fifty years’ experience working with migrants, refugee and diaspora communities in the UK, Frances advises IRR on legal and charitable issues. She has worked with the European Legal Support Centre (on the rights of Palestinian students in the UK), with Reprieve (on citizenship stripping and the case of Shamima Begum) and the Black Equity Organisation, contributing to its successful judicial review (with the Public Law Project) of the government’s reneging on the pledge to implement all the recommendations of the Windrush Lessons Learned review. In 2025 she acted as presiding judge at the Permanent People’s Tribunal on war crimes in Rojava, north-east Syria.
Joint Editor Race & Class, Jenny Bourne
Jenny Bourne, who now co-edits Race & Class had worked at the IRR since 1970 in a variety of roles. She has been active in a number of anti-racist organisations including Women Against Racism and Fascism, CARF (the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism) and, reflecting her Jewish background, was a founder member of the radical pro-Palestinian groups Return and Women in Black. Jenny also curates the legacy derived from A. Sivanandan’s long political career.
Archives and Education Lead, Colin Prescod
Colin who served as Chair of IRR for across some five decades, during which time he helped develop the Black History Archives Collection (now held at the London Archives), continues to play a huge role at IRR specifically advising us on educational initiatives relating to our entire extensive archives. He has over some five decades variously worked as an academic, documentary film maker, theatre maker, TV (BBC) commissioning editor, cultural animator (specifically in museums, archives, and the heritage sector). Most recently he has worked on the permanent exhibition London, Sugar, and Slavery, 2007, Museum of London/Docklands; No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990, 2016, Guildhall Art Gallery; Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land, 2018, British Library; Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation, [Walk Through British Art, Room 13], 2022, Tate Britain.
Rebekah Delsol
Rebekah (she/her) is the Director of Grants for Trust for London, focusing on social justice and exploring the legacies of the Trust’s endowment. She was previously the Executive Co-Director of Healing Justice London, a community organisation that builds the skills, capacities and infrastructures to support community-led health and healing. She has worked for twenty years on anti-discrimination and racial justice issues, focused on building community and civil society capacity to challenge racial profiling and changing structures and cultures in police institutions globally. For over a decade, Rebekah managed the Open Society Justice Initiatives’ Fair and Effective Policing (FEP) project, challenge ethnic profiling through research, litigation and advocacy. She is a founding member and trustee of the charity StopWatch.
Sophie Chauhan
Sophie Chauhan, a PhD student in UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre, is a researcher and writer with a particular interest in radical coalition building. She first joined IRR as a volunteer in March 2022. Sophie supports the IRR’s national anti-racist monitoring work by compiling the IRR News Calendar of Racism and Resistance. Curious Affinities, a collection of her prose and poetry has been published by Hajar Press.
Barbora Černušáková
Barbora Černušáková is a sociologist at the University of Manchester whose work focuses on the political economy and racialisation of labour. Her monograph, Surplus Lives under Racial Capitalism: Roma in Post‑Socialist Czechia (MUP, 2026), explores how racialised social hierarchies and post‑socialist economic restructuring produce new forms of labour precarity.
Barbora’s current research investigates predatory debt enforcement industry and its effect on Roma workers in Czechia. It traces how statutory rules, regulatory gaps, and private enforcement practices (re)produce economic insecurity and intensify racialised vulnerability at work. The project generates evidence for academic analysis and for policy reform, litigation, and community advocacy.
Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury
Is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester, researching race, racism and antiracism in education and policing. He is active in antiracist and abolitionist organising — as a steering group member of the Northern Police Monitoring Project, on the advisory board of Kids of Colour, and through wider activist networks in Greater Manchester.
Sam Berkson
A teacher and poet, Sam, who is of Ashkenazi-Jewish heritage, has 15 years teaching experience in inner-city schools, including 7 years as a senior leader at an alternative provision school in Hackney. His poetry is published by Influx Press and he is a host of the largest network of slam poetry events in the UK. He has run poetry workshops with people of all ages including in refugee camps in Greece and Algeria, the latter leading to the publication of the first ever English translations of poetry from Western Saharan refugees. He co-founded the Create and Debate project which runs workshops with schools and youth projects to help young people learn about and engage with the anti-racist histories of their local area.
Eddie Bruce-Jones
Professor of Law at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe(Routledge, 2016) and researches in the areas of equality law, asylum law, colonial indentureship, race, and law & humanities. He is an associate academic fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and a member of the New York Bar. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Asylum, Immigration and Nationality Law, the Trustee Board of Rainbow Migration (formerly UKLGIG), and the Advisory Board of the Berlin-based Center for Intersectional Justice. He serves on the civilian-led independent commission examining the case of Oury Jalloh—a watershed death-in-police-custody case in Germany.
David Edgar
A playwright and political commentator, and a former President of the Writers’ Guild,. His plays have covered historical and contemporary themes, including the National Front (Destiny), political defection (Maydays), the end of Communism (The Shape of the Table, Pentecost, The Prisoner’s Dilemma), and multiculturalism (Playing with Fire and Testing the Echo). He writes for the Guardian and the London Review of Books, and established a Playwriting Programme at the University of Birmingham, where he was appointed professor in 1995. His book on national-populism, The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, co-written with Jon Bloomfield, was published by Byline in 2024
Gholam Khiabany
Gholam Khiabany, who came to the UK as political refugee in 1990s, is a regular contributor to Race & Class, co-writing with Milly Williamson, a critique of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill and the ‘Smash the Gangs’ policies of the current government. He is a Reader in Media and Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. A scholar-activist, he has written extensively on media in and outside of the Middle East, including Iranian Media: the paradox of modernity (Routledge, 2010) and Blogistan with Annabelle Sreberny (I.B. Tauris, 2010). Gholam is co-editor of the Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East (Wiley/Blackwell, 2023). For 10 years (2012-2022) he was an editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (Brill).
Jasbinder S. Nijjar
Jas Nijjar teaches at Birkbeck, University of London. His work examines the relationship between institutional racism and the militarisation of policing in London. He is a member of the community-led Southall Resists Collective. He is also part of the advisory board of The Monitoring Group, and author of the forthcoming book The Racial Politics of Police Warfare (Manchester University Press).
Neha Shah
Neha is an educator and independent researcher. Her research and writing focuses on Tricontinentalism and the global anti-colonial movement in the 1960s-80s, and the lessons we can take forward into anti-colonial organising in the present day. She is the Vice Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK.