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 a staff of six people 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.
Honorary President, Tony Bunyan
Formerly a Trustee of IRR for over 40 years, he founded and directed the organisation Statewatch and headed the Police Unit of the Greater London Council. His work on matters relating to injustice, policing, secrecy, surveillance and human rights in the UK and EU is unparalleled and his guidance to IRR is profound.
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 was a key organiser of the IRR’s anniversary IRR50 conference held in Autumn 2022.
Vice-chair, Joseph Maggs
Coordinator of SOAS Detainee Support and a regular contributor to IRR News and Race & Class. He has a BA in History from University College London and a Graduate Diploma in Law. He has been a policy and campaigns intern at Liberty and a caseworker at Wilson Solicitors in Tottenham. He volunteers with migrants’ rights organisations and regularly legal observes at protests.
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 for the last 10 years including in refugee camps in Greece and Algeria, 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 histories of their local area.
Lee Bridges
Emeritus Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. 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 researched extensively on legal services, policing and criminal justice, and is currently working closely with IRR on issues relating to the over-policing of black and ethnic minority communities and with the StopWatch coalition on abuses of police stop and search.
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.
Jon Burnett
Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull. He has worked formerly as a researcher at the Institute of Race Relations for six years, and at Medical Justice and at Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers.
Rebekah Delsol
Rebekah (she/her) is the Executive Co-Director of Healing Justice London. 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, working to improve police relations with diverse communities through dialogue, research, litigation and advocacy. She is a founding member and trusteer of the charity StopWatch.
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.
Gholam Khiabany
Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, the University of London. He has written extensively on the media and social change, with particular reference to Iran and to racism and Islamophobia in the UK. He is author of Iranian Media: the paradox of modernity (Routledge, 2010) and co-author, of Blogistan with Annabelle Sreberny (I.B. Tauris, 2010).
Jasbinder S. Nijjar
Jas Nijjar is a Lecturer in Sociology at Brunel University 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 editorial assistant at darkmatter, an open access online journal for contemporary anti-racist/post-colonial critique
Colin Prescod
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 heritage sector). Most recently he has worked on the exhibitions No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990 (2016), with the British Library, Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land (2018), and with Tate Britain, Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation [Walk Through British Art, Room 13], (2022)
Neha Shah
Neha is researching her PhD at Oxford University into anti-colonial movements in 1960s and ‘70s Britain. She is vicechair of Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Frances Webber
Former barrister who specialised in immigration, refugee and human rights law until her retirement in 2008. She is an honorary vice-president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. She co-edited Macdonald’s Immigration Law and Practice (5th edition, 2001, 6th edition 2005) and Halsbury’s British Nationality, Immigration and Asylum (4th edition, 2002 reissue) and speaks and writes on migration and human rights issues. She has also written Borderline justice: the fight for refugee and migrant rights (Pluto, October 2012).