Researching Refugeedom 2022

Описание: As part of Breaking Barriers Refugee Week (28 Feb to 4 Mar 2022), the University of Leicester ran the second edition of Researching Refugeedom.

What sense do refugees make of how they coped with their experiences of displacement to the UK from other countries as unaccompanied young people?
Dr Anya Gkrimpova is a clinical psychologist practising in Birmingham. As part of her doctoral training at Canterbury Christ Church University, she did a study looking into the meaning-making of young adults who had experiences of seeking safety in the UK as unaccompanied children. She worked alongside two experts by experience, who helped to hear the cultural and the religious meanings behind the stories shared by the research participants.

Beyond Resilience: Facilitating Learning and Well-Being in the Refugee Language Classroom
This talk will focus on a recently-completed British Council ELTRA funded research project conducted by an interdisciplinary research team from the University of Leicester. The purpose of this study was to explore how language teachers might contribute positively to the psychological well-being and educational outcomes of refugee-background students (RBS) in English language provision in a University Sanctuary setting, drawing on the fields of TESOL, refugee studies, trauma psychology and positive psychology. This talk will outline the need for this research, how the study was conducted, what was found and what the implications for practice are, both at classroom and wider institutional levels.

Aleks Palanac is an EAP/ESOL Practitioner in the Centre for International Training and Education, University of Leicester. She has been heavily involved in developing its University of Sanctuary initiative, particularly by widening participation to HE for refugee-background students through English language provision, and has recently extended this work to a UK-wide scheme - RefugEAP. Her research develops an approach to trauma-informed ELT for refugees, a topic on which she has written and presented widely.

Whose crime? The ethics and politics of migrant smuggling criminalisation.
With the number of migrants having globally trebled since the 1960s, an increasingly repressive narrative concerning bordercrossing and migration is being established. Tighter border controls, investment in high tech surveillance techniques, externalisation of borders along with a constantly increasing criminalisation of migration have become the main characteristics of current practices of migration management. These have had vast pernicious effects for the rights and lives of prospective migrants and refugees along with serious ethical and practical ramifications for states. This is particularly evident in the criminalisation of migrant smuggling: a relatively recently established crime by the UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air in 2000, migrant smuggling has been consistently presented as a highly profitable illicit activity, often part of global organised crime where brutal smuggling networks take advantage of vulnerable migrants. Recent critical scholarship has proven such portrayals to be mainly inaccurate and has started to address migrant smuggling’s persistent factual knowledge gaps and other conceptual misconceptions. This presentation starts with a synthesis of this scholarship to then argue that the criminalisation of migrant smuggling is ineffective, unethical and unnecessary.

Myriam Fotou is a lecturer in International Relations at the School of History, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester. Her longstanding research aims at the creation of a distinctive ethics of hospitality, which functions as a way of thinking about the relationship between representation and humanisation, of being alert to precarious lives and of responding to the “missing” Other, i.e., an Other who may be present in the Western imaginary and political thought, but who, nonetheless, does not possess any clear status; who is either “illegal” in their presence, existing in a legal vacuum or in the margins of society, or figure of destitution / liminality. Her current research activities are centred around crimmigration and how it affects understandings of key migration figures (migrant, refugee, migrant smuggler, etc.), the language used in ethics of migration and international political theory and its colonial connotations.

Thank you to Marie Nugent for chairing this session.

If you are researcher and would like to present at the next edition of Researching Refugeedom (first week of March 2023), please contact [email protected].

For more information about our work as a University of Sanctuary, please visit http://www.le.ac.uk/sanctuary.