Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi

Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi is an independent investigative journalist. Her work has been twice shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for political writing and her reporting (as part of a UK-wide investigation on the treatment of migrant women fleeing domestic violence) won a Refugee Council award and a Write to End Violence Against Women award. She has written for a range of publications over the course of her career including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Statesman, the Independent, and Prospect magazine. She co-edits Shine A Light, an award-winning investigative journalism and storytelling project, which publishes on openDemocracy.net, and is writer-in-residence at Lacuna, a human rights magazine. Rebecca sits on the Women’s Budget Group Gender Commission and is a trustee of the Orwell Youth Prize. She has written, produced and presented the Migrants’ Law Project podcast, It Can Be Done. Rebecca was appointed the 2020 Stuart Hall Fellow at Sussex University.  

For nearly a decade Rebecca’s journalism has focused on the impact of austerity policies on working class communities and on the government treatment of migrants and refugees. Underpinning that work has been a focus on the lives of women, who bear the brunt of punitive welfare policy, and specifically on migrant women, who face the intersecting inequalities of both austerity and the “hostile environment”. During Rebecca’s Stuart Hall Fellowship 2019/20 she will progress her reporting on the lives of these women as well as developing other areas of her work. Alongside her own work, Rebecca will develop a Writing Wrongs project for local sixth-formers from backgrounds under-represented in journalism.