Summer Newsletter

Our Summer newsletter is now available to view online. This issue highlights our activities over the summer, as well as our recent Faith and Displacement series, which you can read in full on our website. Please follow the link below for important project updates, including blog highlights and information on recent and forthcoming events: Newsletter…

Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part One

Refugees are Dialectical Beings: Part One by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford and Refugee Hosts Writer in Residence    The camp is a passing human, a book, a manuscript, an archive... Bury it; smother it with its own dust, so it might return as a holy text devoid of intentions.  Writing the camp-archive I…

Hope, Resilience and Uncertainty: A Day with Displaced Syrians in Southern Turkey

In this piece, which draws on Charlotte Loris-Rodionoff's on-going fieldwork in Turkey, we are offered a glimpse of how loss, hope, memory and the future are navigated by Syrian refugees in the everyday. This quotidian lens provides an important antidote to the narratives of exceptionalism that typically colour media and policy responses to forced migration, unearthing diverse experiences of displacement, and…

The Kindness of Strangers: The Challenges and Rewards of Opening Your Home to Refugees

In this piece, which is a reposting from The Sunday Herald (originally published 18 June 2017), Professor Alison Phipps of the University of Glasgow reflects on her experiences hosting her former host in Glasgow, a refugee displaced by conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a fascinating example of guest-host reciprocity, something we are exploring in…

A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger

A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger By Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, University of Oxford Listen here (read by Y. M. Qasmiyeh):  I The moon is the birthmark of the refugee. His birth equates to the mauling of his entire body. Nothing is anomalous about the wound. While waiting, we bite our nails and flesh. Once I…

Time Machine: Stereoscopic Views from Palestine, 1900

This March, the Middle East Studies department at Brown University, Rhode Island is hosting an exhibition - Time Machine: Stereoscopic Views from Palestine, 1900 - that invites spectators to become time travellers. Drawing on 100 images taken in 1900 of Palestine and the surrounding 'Holy Land', the collection - curated by Ariella Azoulay and Issam Nassar…

Spring Newsletter

Our Spring newsletter is now available to view online. Please follow the link below for information on the project, including blog highlights, updates and information on how you can get involved: 2017 01 Spring If you have any questions, or would like to get involved in the project, please get in touch by visiting our…

‘Travelling Fear’ in Global Context: Exploring Everyday Dynamics of In/Security and Im/Mobility

By Aydan Greatrick and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, University College London This piece puts Trump’s recent “Muslim Ban” (and the exceptional responses to it) in context by focusing on the everyday dynamics of in/security and im/mobility that have long framed the lives of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, including refugees from Syria.…

Abdulrazak Gurnah In Conversation

On 20 February, UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies hosted renowned novelist and critic Prof. Abdulrazak Gurnah to explore the roles of narration and storytelling in the context of migration and displacement (a key theme for our Refugee Hosts project). Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels – including Memories of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994), Admiring Silence (1996),…