Refuge in a Moving World: beyond hospitality and hostility

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Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies, UCL Department of Geography, delivers her Inaugural Lecture: Refuge in a Moving World: beyond hospitality and hostility

About the lecture

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.

About the speaker

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Co-Director of UCL's Migration Research Unit and Director of the Refuge in a Moving World interdisciplinary network. She is currently leading a number of multi-year research projects including the AHRC-ESRC funded project, 'Local Community Experiences of and Responses to Displacement from Syria' (www.refugeehosts.org) and an ERC-funded project, Southern-Led Responses to Displacement from Syria (www.southernresponses.org). Her recent books include The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival, South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development, The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies and The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations.

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A woman looks over Baddawi refugee camp in North Lebanon. (C) E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Inaugural Lecture Series 2019/20

This lecture is part of the 2019/20 series for UCL's Faculty of Arts & Humanities and Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences. The series provides an opportunity to recognise and celebrate the achievements of our professors who are undertaking research and scholarship of international significance, and offers an insight into the strength and vitality of the arts, humanities and social sciences at UCL.

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