Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Southern Responses to Displacement’s PI, has been awarded a Cornell-UCL Global Strategic Collaboration Awards. The award was won jointly with colleagues Dr. Saida Hodzic and Dr Eleanor Paynter from Cornell University.
Building on the interdisciplinary strengths in migration and refugee studies across both UCL and Cornell University, the “Migration and Refuge” Working Group will foster new opportunities for dialogue and sustainable collaboration among faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars, producing academic and public-facing outputs.
The Migration and Refuge: Collaborations Across Borders project aims to advance understandings of borders, mobility, displacement, and refuge through interdisciplinary collaboration oriented around critical approaches to migration and refugee studies. The working group will respond both to the realities of the global age of migration and displacement, as well as to the longer histories of policy and scholarship on borders and asylum that have centered Western and statist perspectives, rather than prioritizing the voices and experiences of those crossing borders. Together, the initiative will build synergies around:
– Southern perspectives on migration and displacement
– Scholarship and praxis that meaningfully recognize refugees as producers of knowledge
– Refuge – rather than fetishization of the refugee – as a starting point of analysis.
Speaking about the Award, Prof. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh said:
It is wonderful to have this opportunity to work together with colleagues from across Cornell to collaboratively develop critical approaches to migration and refugee studies.
As a group, we are looking forward to convening a series of interdisciplinary events at Cornell later this year, including a hybrid working group meeting bringing together scholars and researchers from across UCL and Cornell, a public-facing roundtable and poetry reading, a class visit and publication workshop to showcase the work of the Migration and Society journal, in addition to preparing podcasts and a range of publications across a number of languages.
Find out more about the Cornell-UCL Global Strategic Collaboration Awards at https://global.cornell.edu/hub/home/seed-grants).
Featured image: Abu Diab, the gravedigger in Baddawi camp, with his hands at rest. (c) E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. December 2016.
Southern Responses to Displacement 
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