The Matter Of Migration: Our Shared Humanity

“More than your average podcast” is how João Paulo Simões, filmmaker and host, sound designer and creator of The Matter of Migration podcast, described his project, when I spoke with him at Sheffield’s Crystal Peaks Shopping Centre this week. This important and timely project debuted at the S20 venue on 22 January, where it remains until Wednesday – before heading to other Sheffield communities across 2026.

Simões was greatly influenced by his work with refugees and asylum seekers. His experiences, both through his work and as a migrant himself, have fed into his choices when deciding how to format the piece. “People relate to the individual”, he told me, “and they respond to the personality of the host” - and given how personal the topic is, and how the mainstream media tends to treat migrants, a more personal format was needed.

The primary challenge of the podcast was in making it more than the ‘average’ - creating an experience, rather than just a podcast, in which it exceeds expectations. The podcast is nomadic, intending to create an immersive experience in communities that it aims to both reflect and challenge as it travels. But this requires a lot of work. The ‘pod’ itself requires construction and deconstruction, and the logistics of organising for spaces to be booked and set pieces to be moved can form a barrier when there is no reply to the request - reflecting a microcosm of some of the struggles that migrants face when they travel to England; the paperwork and bureaucracy and waiting on results.

By contrast, Simões paints a musical and communal picture of the recording of the podcast, comparing it to jazz - “the conversation is very free and informal”. Speaking with a network of people with shared experiences, he said, created “moments of deep recognition of our shared humanity. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved at times”.

‍Ms Ghada Mohamad,who came along to the event, agreed with this sentiment. A PhD student at the University of Sheffield who is studying migration, she confirmed that the podcast “reflects the experiences of both the participants of my research and myself”. The location, she said, was especially significant, given Sheffield’s status as having been the first city to become a “City of Sanctuary”.

“What emerges in a lot of these conversations,” Simões said, “is that a lot of the values and the things that people in a given community find important are constrained by class”. This theme turned out to be oddly prevalent in the making of the podcast.

This, of course, reflects the anti-migrant sentiment that has been spreading through the mainstream media for the last few years, rearing its ugly head every time anybody who doesn’t look suitably “British” does anything at all. Simões describes this as a ‘convenient rhetoric serving other interests’ - people feel a strong sense of injustice, and rather than look for the root of this injustice, it is much easier to pin the blame on the ‘other’. Populist movements are weaponising a historical discomfort around foreigners in order to sow hatred, but if people would listen to the voices and experiences of migrants, they would find that they “have a lot more in common than they thought”.

The partial aim of the Matter of Migration podcast, then, is to spark a sense of compassion and to help start the conversations necessary for this sort of understanding to happen. Ms Mohamad said that it was very important to have these discussions being started in a place that is not the heart of the city, but instead a little further out, a “different perspective to the mainstream media” which often has more influence outside of the more diverse city centre.

Most importantly, though, Simões describes the goal of “providing representation for people who feel neglected”.

While it is difficult to know how people will react, the hope is certainly positive, and that a fresh, human take on a topic often reduced to numbers and hateful, nationalist rhetoric will touch the hearts of many.

“To some degree,” Simões concluded, “you only realise the importance of what you’re doing after the fact. I feel privileged to have been a part of something so important.”

The Matters Of Migration podcast launch will be at Crystal Peaks Library until the 28th of January, before moving on to its next venue. Details HERE

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Header Image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/