Displacing Universities is an audio exploration into higher education initiatives for displaced people in Europe, including refugees and asylum seekers.
Through a series of interviews with administrators, teachers, students, alumni and researchers from refugee education programmes Displacing Universities explores different approaches to refugee education, analyses their ability to foster social justice, and asks if their work can lead to any fundamental changes in universities.
Displacing Universities utilises podcasting as a research method, an experiment to how injury-driven publicly available interviews can contribute to a research project. The podcast will be peer reviewed following a post-publication community accountable process. All material is published under a Creative Common CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence and so is free to use by other researchers, if they wish.
The project has three research objectives:
1) To analyse the interaction between different approaches to refugee higher education within university initiatives in Europe.
How do the multi-scalar multi-actor conceptions, expectations and experiences foster or inhibit social justice?
How does the weight of politics, solidarity, and need for success affect initiatives?
How does the legal status and intersectional education disadvantage affect who gets to be an average student, who needs to be mainstream,/ed, and who gets to be curious?
How do initiatives impact students later in their education?
2) To analyse the impact of refugee higher education initiatives on universities in which they operate.
How are the questions raised by refugee education initiatives (e.g. relating to merit, access, alternative assessment, costs) translated throughout institutions, and to what effect (on refugee /asylum-seeking students and others)?
What relationships do university initiatives develop with civil society, activists, and developmental agencies, and how does this reconfigure the social purpose of universities?
3) To analyse what role universities and higher education policies can play as part of a wider response to increasing numbers of displaced people seeking refuge in Europe.
Can refugee education initiatives lead to the establishment of longer term programmatic structures that move beyond barriers-solutions or crisis-response, and towards a more socially just higher education and European society?
Is the hyper mobility of the European student citizen and the controlled fixity of the refugee challenged by the figure of the refugee student and to what effect?
The podcast creators are Ian M. Cook, Ibrar Mirzai, Svitlana Shynkarenko and Monica Tassaduque.
In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian speaks with Elisabeth Boston. Elisabeth is the Refugee policy officer at UCLouvain in Belgium. They speak about Access2University (A2U), a programme that aims to prepare refugees (applicants) with little or no knowledge of French to resume university studies, and Education Pathways, which is an initiative to bring displaced people to Belgium to study.
In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian and Svitlana speak with Marie-Christine Ukelo-Mbolo Merga about Perspectives AlterEgauZ* at the University of Fribourg.
In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian and Monica are speaking about the various Initiatives for Refugees at University of Cologne with Ariane Elshof. Ariane works in the Department ‘International Students & Global Responsibility’ where she’s the Team Lead for Academic Refugee Support and Coordinates the Study Preparatory Measures for Refugees.
In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian speaks with Paul O’Keefe. Paul worked for many years at in Kakkuma refugee camp in Kenya, including for the University of Geneva’s Inzone project. He also has strong ties with Vijana Twaweza Club, a sustainable agriculture organisation which is based in the camp, a group he keeps in touch with as part of his new job as Head of Education and Research at Airfield Estate in Dublin.
In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian is speaking with Andrew Flaus about Education Pathways at the University of Galway.
In this episode Ian and Ibrar speak with Judith Beyer and Leila Dedial about The Hilde Domin Training Programme at
