Watch Refugee Hosts’ contribution to the Imperial War Museum exhibition – Refugees: Forced to Flee
Refugee Hosts is part of a major new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London from the 24th of September – 13th June 2021. The museum will re-open to the public on the 19th of May 2021. Refugee Hosts’ contribution to the exhibition includes a video featuring photographs, poems and stories gathered throughout our research in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe. In the video, Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh discusses Refugee Hosts’ research and reads poetry by Refugee Hosts’ writer-in-residence, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh.
Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh Discusses Refugee Hosts Research on BBC Radio 3
At 10pm, on the 18th of June 2020, Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh discusses Refugee Hosts on BBC Radio 3. The programme marks Refugee Week 2020 and highlights Refugee Hosts’ interdisciplinary approach to understanding local experiences of and responses to displacement, which is also featured in the Imperial War Museum London exhibition ‘Refugee: Forced to Flee.’ To find out more about Refugee Hosts’ research in Lebanon and Jordan, please see our Reflections from the Field Series, or visit our About the Project webpages.
Click here to listen to the broadcast.
To find out more about the Imperial War Museum exhibition, click here.
Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh discusses COVID-19 and poverty on Channel 4 News
Refugee Hosts PI Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, on Channel 4 News, discusses how Covid-19 is impacting people living in poverty around the world. Prof. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh highlights the diversity of national and international responses, including by Low and Middle Income Countries. She argues for global solutions based on principles of solidarity to address the global pandemic in ways that are inclusive and socially just.
You can read how refugees in Lebanon are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in an article written by Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and drawing on her Refugees Hosts research here.
Bridging Voices: Religion and Social Justice Project Video
Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh talks about the findings of a new report titled “Religion and Social Justice for Refugees”, which has been published in collaboration with Yale University, the British Council and the Refugee Hosts project. The report offers fresh insights into the roles played by faith-based actors and local faith communities in contexts of displacement in diverse contexts around the world. Drawing on over 300 in-depth interviews with refugees, members of local host communities and locally based organisations in towns, cities and camps in Cameroon, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, Lebanon and Jordan, the report identifies and examines the ways that faith plays an important role in supporting social justice for refugees.
Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh – Inaugral Lecture: Refuge in a Moving World: beyond hospitality and hostility
You can listen to the podcast and view the lecture slides, here.
Refugee Hosts PI, Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, delivered her Inaugural Lecture: Refuge in a Moving World: beyond hospitality and hostility on the 10th of December 2019.
People have been displaced throughout history and across all geographies, and yet attention to displacement ebbs and flows across time and space. Most displaced people remain within their regions of origin, often facing a combination of hospitality and hostility, and developing different ways of responding to their own situations.
This lecture traces the multiple ways that responses to displacement are enacted by people with personal and family experiences of forced migration, including in their capacity as researchers, writers and artists, and aid providers. Drawing on research conducted in camps and cities in the Middle East and North Africa, this lecture examines how different people experience and respond to their own situations (and that of others), in the presence of diverse barriers and structural inequalities.
Ultimately, the lecture argues that working collaboratively through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies has the potential to develop nuanced understandings of processes of migration and displacement, and, in turn, more sustainable modes of responding to our moving world.
Refugee Hosts’ writer in residence, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, at Migrant Knowledge, Early Modern and Beyond: an event at the Crossroads.
This event brought together scholars, artists and activists to think about migration and what it does with, and to, knowledge. The video features Yousif M. Qasmiyeh discussing his writing and reading an extract from his poem, ‘Thresholds.’
Prof Lyndsey Stonebridge on Thinking Allowed – BBC Radio 4
Prof. Stonebridge discusses her new book, ‘Placeless People’, Writing, Rights and Refugees’ which examines how writers and political thinkers understood and wrote about refugees. The book traces their work from the mid 20th century to the present day, starting on the German/Czech border and ending in Baddawi refugee camp, a key research site for the Refugee Hosts’ project. The book also includes critical reflections on the poetry of Refugee Hosts’ writer-in-residence, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, whose work you can read here.
Dr Anna Rowlands on BBC Radio 4’s “Immigration & Religion: A Sunday Programme Special”
In her contribution to this BBC Radio 4 programme, Dr. Rowlands discusses the impact of immigration on public and political debate and argues that, with regard to current attitudes and responses to migration, we are paying the price for a political environment that has failed to pay attention to a range of cultural, economic and political questions. Anna discusses these questions in addition to drawing on her experiences of faith communities in the North of England that, within the context of immigration, can become spaces of encounter, where the plurality of interpretations of religious text and experiences, particularly during migrant journeys, can lead to the emergence of new faith practices, valuable to host and migrant communities alike.
Bridging Voices – Religion and Social Justice for Refugees
Listen to the Bridging Voices Religion and Social Justice for Refugee’s PIs discuss British Council USA research that we are contributing to via Refugee Hosts.
‘Welcoming Refugees. The Role of Religion’ Conference – Key note speech and interview.
On 12th October 2018, Refugee Hosts PI Prof. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh provided the keynote lecture: “From the Local to the Global: The Roles of Local Faith Communities in Refugee Situations in the Global South”, and was interviewed at the ‘Welcoming Refugees: The role of religion’ conference organised by the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
The 2018 anniversary symposium of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), What We CAN Do When There’s Nothing To Be Done. 10 years of CSSD
In September 2018 Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge represented Refugee Hosts at the Centre for the Study of Social Difference anniversary symposium and (from min. 14″) discussed two creative pieces that demonstrate the ‘necessary but enforced neighbourliness’ of displaced communities in Lebanon; Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s poem ‘Writing the Camp’ and Marwa Abu Khalil’s film ‘Witwet’.
BBC Radio 4: In Our Time – Hannah Arendt
2 February 2017, BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – London: Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt alongside Melvyn Bragg, Frisbee Sheffield and Robert Eagleton. Read more about her appearance here.
Listen to the episode here.
Faith, Secularism and Humanitarian Engagement
12 December 2016, Columbia University, New York NY: Prof. Alastair Ager discusses his research into the tensions between secularism and faith in humanitarian engagements. The ideas discussed in this talk are drawn from Alastair’s book Faith, Secularism and Humanitarian Engagement: Finding the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Peoples.
Hospitality and Hostility: The Role of Established Refugees in a Crisis
1 November 2016, UCL Lunchtime Lectures – London: Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh discusses her research into displacement, and the important but often overlooked role established refugees are playing in responding to conflict-induced displacement from Syria.
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