Tag: refugees

NTNU PhD Studentship: Social Work, International Migration, Refugee Studies (Norway)

“Studentships“PhD Candidate in Social work, with a focus on international migration and refugee studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Deadline: 29 June 2025.

This three-years position is a part of the ANCHOR: Advancing Neighborhood, Community, and HOusing for the integration of Refugee families, an inter-disciplinary project funded under the NTNU’s strategic research area: Community. ANCHOR focuses on how housing and neighborhood environments can support refugee families’ wellbeing, social integration, and sense of belonging. This position will focus on Norwegian municipal contexts, examining how physical and social aspects of housing intersect with the everyday lives of refugee families with children.

ANCHOR investigates how entangled social, political, and environmental processes shape the housing experiences, wellbeing, and sense of belonging among refugee families in Norway. By focusing on non-linear and sometimes unexpected outcomes of policy, planning, and community design, the project aims to reveal how conventional approaches can inadvertently deepen uncertainties or, conversely, foster more inclusive forms of community life.

Challenging the traditional separation of social from material and environmental factors, ANCHOR takes a holistic and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on social and architectural anthropology, urban planning, social work, childhood studies, and public health. Central to this endeavor is an emphasis on intersectionality, which recognizes that factors such age, gender, cultural background, and generational dynamics can shape different layers of vulnerability or resilience within refugee families. Methodologically, the project combines creative, participatory methods with established qualitative techniques. This multi-method strategy seeks to co-create knowledge with refugee families, local communities, NGOs, and municipal authorities.

This project is a collaboration among the Departments of Architecture and Planning, Social Work and Public Health and Nursing, and it includes two PhD positions. The successful PhD candidate will work closely with their counterpart in the Department of Architecture and Planning. Norwegian and English are the main languages in use at the Department.

U Strathclyde: Role of 3rd Sector Organizations in Supporting Asylum Seekers and Refugees (UK)

Postdocs

Postdoctoral Researcher: Role of Third Sector Organizations in Supporting Asylum Seekers’ and Refugees’ Integration, Citizenship, and Belonging, University of Strathclyde, UK. Deadline: 9 May 2025.

The role of charities and community groups has become more prominent over the last decade of austerity and ongoing cost-of-living crisis, including in relation to support for asylum seekers and refugees. The aim of the study is to address this gap and provide evidence on the role of third sector organisations in supporting refugee integration and individuals who are navigating the UK asylum system.  This opportunity is for 3 years.

U Deusto: Postdoc in Re-shaping Attitudes about Refugees and Gender Minorities in Spain and Portugal (Spain)

Postdocs

Postdoctoral Researcher: Re-shaping Attitudes about Refugees and Gender Minorities in Spain and Portugal, University of Duesto, Bilbao, Spain. Deadline: 28 March 2025.

The Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the University of Deusto is seeking a motivated and highly qualified Postdoctoral Researcher to join the project Re-shaping Attitudes about Refugees and Gender Minorities in Spain and Portugal. This project explores how negative public opinion and social attitudes can be transformed using cutting-edge quantitative methods, particularly survey experiments. The postdoctoral researcher will assist the PI in devising and testing alternative human-rights-based narratives about refugees and gender minorities to counter hate speech and marginalising far-right narratives that target these vulnerable/disadvantaged groups.

Broadcasts Foster Dialogue among Refugees and Host Communities (Moldova)

Applied ICD

Broadcasts to foster dialogue and understanding among refugees and host communities, Moldova.

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, UNESCO supported broadcasters in neighbouring countries, such as Teleradio-Moldova (TRM), to launch a series of programmes to aid Ukrainian refugees with support from the Government of Japan. Displaced Ukrainian media professionals were included in the broadcasts to better help refugees navigate their new lives in Moldova. Funded by the Government of Japan as an emergency project under the UN’s Regional Refugee Response Plan for the Ukraine Situation, UNESCO supported TRM to produce and broadcast programmes accessible to the displaced Ukrainians to help them settle and rebuild their lives in Moldova.

Daria Russu, host of TV Moldova 1’s 30-minute Ukrainian-language “Weekly” TV-programme, noted the challenge refugees face in accessing credible news in their mother tongue: “Ukrainian refugees have nowhere to get information about Moldova and they have nowhere to get information about the world in general. That is exactly why this project is needed, so they can get verified, truthful and complete information in their native language.”

Over the course of seven months, TRM broadcasted nearly 100 programmes for tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees in Moldova. These covered a wide range of topics, including health, education, housing and daily life in the host country. More than 200 refugees, national experts and humanitarian actors were interviewed, providing valuable insights and perspectives for the programmes.

A key component of the project was a baseline study on the media habits and information needs of the Ukrainian refugees, commissioned by UNESCO from its long-term partner, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Loreana Sacara, TRM’s Project Coordinator, highlighted that the programmes were designed based on the research’s findings: “The programmes early gathered a wide loyal audience both among the refugees and the local population. They were aired in the Ukrainian language with subtitles or voiceovers in Romanian”.

U Oxford: Project Coordinator for Refugee-Led Research Hub (UK)

“Job

Project Coordinator (Refugee-Led Research Hub), Department of International Development, University of Oxford, UK. Deadline: 13 February 2023.

The Oxford Department of International Development is seeking to recruit a Project Coordinator for the Refugee-Led Research Hub (RLRH). RLRH is an initiative of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at the University of Oxford. RLRH supports individuals with lived experience of displacement to become leaders in the field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. RLRH does so by delivering academic programming to a global cohort of students who have been affected by displacement, supporting access to graduate degrees and professional development opportunities.

The post holder will play an integral role in coordinating day-to-day administration of the project, including relating to finance, budgeting, communications, reporting, travel, publications, and human resources. They will also liaise with RLRH and the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) administration teams based in Nairobi. The role provides a dynamic opportunity to work within a diverse team of colleagues and researchers based across the world.

 

Intercultural Cities: Refugees & Diverse Societies Videos

Applied ICD

The Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities Programme has prepared 2 versions of a video (about 10 minutes long and 3 minutes short) on refugees and diverse societies, and made them publicly available.

Their goal is to raise awareness among policy makers, practitioners and the wider public to the main principles of the intercultural cities successful approach to refugee inclusion. The longer version includes examples drawn from ICC member cities. The shorter version is intended just for general awareness of major issues.

The Intercultural cities programme supports local and regional authorities worldwide in reviewing their policies through an intercultural and intersectional lens, and accompany them developing comprehensive intercultural strategies to help them manage diversity positively and realise the diversity advantage. The programme provides a set of analytical and practical tools to help local stakeholders through the various stages of the process.

12′ Refugee Puppet Sparks ICD

Applied ICDAlex Marshall, Carlotta Gall and Elisabetta Povoledo. (2021, November 10). Four months, 5,000 miles: A refugee puppet looks for home. New York Times.

Throughout the trek, the 12-foot-tall puppet — which required up to four people to control — would make over 140 stops in eight countries, at venues ranging from refugee camps to the Royal Opera House in London. Those would include theatrical spectacles, including a final event in Manchester, England, as well as spontaneous encounters, with Amal (whose name means hope in Arabic) simply walking through a city or village and seeing what happens.

Little Amal represents a 9-year-old Syrian girl separated from her family, searching for her mother from Turkey to England. The goal is for her plight, representing that of refugee children more generally, to spark conversations. The map of her walk, and further information about the project’s goals and outcomes, is available here. A TED talk by the artistic director, Amir Nizar Zuabi, is available here.

Listen: Learning from Intercultural Storytelling (Germany)

Applied ICDListen: Learning from Intercultural Storytelling (Germany).

The aim of LISTEN is to use “applied storytelling”, meaning storytelling without “professional” storytellers, in its many forms and functions as educational approach for the work with refugees – be it to support language learning, to exchange about cultural differences, to create visions etc.

In order to give refugees a voice in the receiving societies and to support their integration, LISTEN will explore different approaches to storytelling and how radio and other forms of audio broadcasting (e.g. podcasting) can be used as medium to share those stories.

Opera as a Way to Integrate Refugees (Germany)

Applied ICDBarone, J. (12 August 2018). A German opera spotlights the refugee crisis, with refugees. New York Times.

A performance of Moses, by the Bavarian State Opera’s youth program, written for refugees, children of immigrants and born-and-raised Bavarians, demonstrates how to integrate and welcome refugees while simultaneously giving them language skills and producing opera. “In the opera, a mixture of new music by Benedikt Brachtel and adapted excerpts from Rossini’s “Mosè in Egitto,” the teenagers tell the story of Moses — common ground for followers of the Bible, Torah and Quran — with Brechtian interludes about refugee experiences and current events.”

CFP Refugee Socialities & the Media

Publication OpportunitiesCFP: Refugee Socialities and the Media (A Special Issue for the journal Popular Communication)

Issue Editors: Jonathan Corpus Ong (U of Massachusetts) and Maria Rovisco (U of Leicester)

This special issue explores the ways in which diverse media and artistic genres cultivate social relationships with and among refugees and internally displaced populations. Building on political-economic studies of forced migration and critiques of humanitarian securitization in the European ‘refugee crisis’ response, this collection draws attention to the role of media and popular communication in shaping the affective dimension of the refugee experience and citizen response. While this collection engages with the dominant discourses that amalgamate fears about diverse migrant communities in Europe and North America, it invites deeper reflection on the social arrangements and emotional expressions afforded by a broader range of: popular communication genres, technological interventions, artistic spaces, and everyday media practices. The theme ‘Refugee Socialities and the Media’ thus redirects focus onto how popular media forms and mediated interactions materialize and visualize processes of inclusion and exclusion and create possibilities for coping and healing for refugees.

Continue reading “CFP Refugee Socialities & the Media”