Written by The Refugee Hosts project is pleased to announce this two day conference, bringing together key academics, practitioners, creatives and experts in the fields of migration, displacement and refugees, to challenge, inform and debate dominant humanitarian discourse, the politics and ethics of knowledge production, and current theory and practice in relation to forced migration.
When: 24th – 25th of October 2019
Where: IAS Common Ground, University College London. (click here for full address and map)
Through a series of presentations, panel and roundtable discussions, workshops and film screenings, the conference provides an opportunity to join Refugee Hosts’ ‘community of conversation’ on key themes including:
- Disrupting humanitarian narratives
- Stories of overlapping displacement
- Hosting, hospitality and the common good
- The politics and ethics of knowledge production in refugee and conflict situations
- Translation, literature and refugee response
- Rethinking community, rights and displacement
Through these debates and conversations, the conference will evaluate future opportunities and challenges for understanding and responding to forced displacement and refugees, and will map out future research and policy agendas.
A programme for the 2 day event will be available soon. To register for the event please visit the conference Eventbrite page.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers and Chairs include:
Homi K. Bhabha (Opening Keynote Speaker) is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English, the Director of the Humanities Center and the Senior Advisor on the Humanities to the President and Provost at Harvard University. Prof. Bhabha has authored a number of publications exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, and cosmopolitanism. His work includes Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, reprinted as a Routledge Classic in 2004.
Patricia Daley (Keynote Speaker) is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa and Vice-Principal and The Helen Morag Fellow in Geography at Jesus College, Oxford. Prof. Daley’s main research interests are the political economy of population migration and settlement (forced migration, identity politics and citizenship); the intersection of space, gender, militarism, sexual violence and peace (feminist geo-politics); racial hierarchies and violence (geographies of racialization and coloniality using Critical Race Theory and decolonizing methodologies); the relationship between conservation, resource extraction, and rural livelihoods (political ecology). She has authored, edited and contributed to numerous publications, including her 2018 co-edited book, The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations.
Sari Hanafi (Keynote Speaker) is Professor of Sociology at the American University of Beirut and editor of Idafat: the Arab Journal of Sociology (Arabic). He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Poitiers and Migrintern (France), University of Bologna and Ravenna (Italy) and visiting fellow in CMI (Bergen, Norway). The former Director of the Palestinian Refugee and Diaspora Centre (Shaml) from 2000-2004, Prof. Hanafi has authored a number of publications including Knowledge Production in the Arab World (Routledge). He is the co-editor of Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant.
Alison Phipps (Chair) holds the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow where she is also Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, and Co-Convener of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET). She teaches refugee studies, critical multilingual studies, religious and spiritual education, anthropology and intercultural education and education for non-violence in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (Presenter and Chair) is Refugee Hosts’ Writer-in-Residence. He is a poet and translator, and tutor in Arabic at the University of Oxford, where he is also undertaking research into conceptualisations of time and containment in the burgeoning field of ‘Refugee Writing.’ In addition to his many contributions to Refugee Hosts – including ‘Writing the Camp’, ‘The Camp is Time’, ‘Refugees are Dialectical Beings Parts One and Two’ and ‘A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger’ -, his recent poems include At the Feast of Asylum’ (GeoHumanities, 2016), ‘If this is my face, so be it’ (Modern Poetry in Translation, 2016) and ‘Thresholds’ (Critical Quarterly, 2014).
The conference is convened by Refugee Hosts’ Principal Investigator, Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (UCL), and the project’s Co-Investigators, Prof. Alastair Ager (Queen Margaret University), Dr. Anna Rowlands (Durham University) and Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of Birmingham). It marks the start of the fourth and final year of our AHRC-ESRC funded Refugee Hosts project, which began in 2016 and has been investigating local community responses to and experiences of displacement in and from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
Attending the Conference:
A number of bursaries will be available to cover the costs of attending the conference for participants who would otherwise be unable to attend. To apply for a bursary please indicate this during your registration and an application form will be sent to you via direct mail.
Childcare will be provided at the conference. For planning purposes, requests for childcare can be submitted during the registration process.
The conference will be live-streamed with subtitles.
Refugee Hosts 
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