Public Seminar Series Trinity term 2023

Oxford Sanctuary Fair

Public Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2023

Public Seminar Series Hilary Term 2024

Public Seminar Series Trinity term 2024

Public Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2024

Public Seminar Series Hilary term 2025

Public Seminar Series Trinity term 2025

Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term 2025

Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term 2026

Seminar: The British churches, refugee ‘crises’ and anti-migrant sentiment 1903-1918

Speaker: Dr Daniel Renshaw (University of Reading)

RSC Seminar, 16 May 2023
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2023

About the seminar
The British churches in Edwardian and post-Edwardian Britain held a unique and sometimes confused status within the wider society. The Anglican Church, the Catholic Church and to an extent elements of the nonconformist denominations were all viewed in different contexts as constituting parts of the political and cultural establishment. Yet at the same time, they were expected to represent the nation’s moral consciousness, and had the potential to act as a subversive or disruptive force within the national discourse.

This paper will examine how the British church leaderships responded to two refugee ‘crises’ in the early twentieth century; the first being the ongoing persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, culminating in the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, and the second the displacement of civilian populations from states allied to Britain during the First World War. It will consider the contrasts apparent between the stances adopted by the churches on the events that occasioned the movement of refugees, almost always condemnatory towards oppressive regimes and sympathetic to the migrants themselves, and the far more ambiguous response to the actual physical presence of refugees in Britain itself. In the case of Eastern European Jews before 1914, the churches, sometimes in tandem with minority communal institutions, provided support and charitable relief, but also attempted proselytization, creating significant tensions between Christian clerics and their Jewish counterparts.

There was also some hostility on the part of local church congregations in areas where refugees settled towards the presence of migrants. This antipathy fed into a narrative of both physical and spiritual displacement of Christians by non-Christian arrivals. As sympathetic as the British church leaderships might be towards the refugees, they also had to address the sometimes negative responses of their own parishioners.

The second half of the paper will discuss the changed circumstances of wartime, and church provision for predominantly Christian refugees between 1914 and 1918. Although the vexed issue of proselytization was not apparent to the same extent, there were still practical and theological tensions, between different British church institutions (especially the Catholic Church and the Church of England), and between refugee clerics themselves.

Through the lens of two refugee ‘crises’ this paper will consider how bodies wielding predominantly moral authority, rather than explicit political power, can play a role, positive or negative, in the ways in which refugees are perceived and treated. This not an issue consigned to the past, as the contemporary debate on migration, asylum, and removal, in which senior church figures have become involved, indicates. 

About the speaker
Daniel Renshaw lectures in modern British and continental European history at the University of Reading. His research focuses on immigration, identity and articulation of prejudice. He is particularly interested in comparative history, examining and comparing the experiences of different ethnic and religious communities. His current research examines British church responses to migration and minority identity between 1900 and 1981.

Photo credit: Russian Jewish refugees at the Port of Liverpool in 1882.  Credit: Public domain.

The British churches, refugee ‘crises’ and anti-migrant sentiment 1903-1918 | Daniel Renshaw

Seminar: Making refugees in India
Speaker: Dr Ria Kapoor (Queen Mary University of London)

RSC Seminar, 23 May 2023
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2023

About the seminar
Making Refugees in India offers a global history of India’s ideas and practices surrounding the refugee. In focusing on one of the first states to formally decolonise in the middle of the 20th century, the book examines how the shift from colonial to postcolonial – both within the subcontinent as well as the shifting nature of the international order– led to a rewriting of the global idea of the refugee. Though India has not signed the two key United Nations instruments pertaining to refugees, it has offered sanctuary for millions over the course of the twentieth century. Examining the period from the so-called ‘Wilsonian’ moment all the way to the East Pakistani refugee crisis of 1971, Making Refugees extends the timeline of India’s history with refugees well beyond the Partition of 1947. Doing so reveals that India’s seemingly inconsistent refugee policy is actually representative of an ongoing tension between self-determination versus individual rights in a former-colony-turned-nation-state even as it worried about colonial inequities being reproduced in the postcolonial world order of the United Nations. The refugee thus became both constitutive and destructive of Indian citizenship, and any share of rights accorded to them by India – rights born from an anti-colonial battle for self-determination – had to be measured against the sovereignty that gave India both the power to grant rights to Indian citizens but also to argue for an equitable world order in global forums.

About the speaker
Dr Ria Kapoor is a Lecturer in History and a fellow of QMUL’s interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She completed a DPhil in History at the University of Oxford, has previously held posts at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester.

Photo:  A view from a Tibetan refugee centre near Darjeeling, West Bengal. (CC BY-SA 4.0)  Credit: Narwadesameer1678.

Making refugees in India | Ria Kapoor

Seminar: Refuge and resistance: Palestinians and the global refugee regime
Speaker: Dr Anne Irfan (University College London)

RSC Seminar, 30 May 2023
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2023

About the seminar
Palestinians have long held a peculiar positionality within the global refugee regime. Served by a specialised UN body, namely the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), they are the most protracted refugee population in the world and the only group excluded from UNHCR's mandate. As a result, Palestinian refugee politics - and particularly political resistance - has often been situated at the intersection of nationalism and internationalism. This talk, based on the forthcoming book Refuge and Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2023), will trace the history and politics of UNRWA’s interactions with Palestinian communities, particularly in the refugee camps where it functioned as a surrogate state. The book shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue. In the process, we see how refugees must be understood as agents in shaping the global refugee regime, and not simply recipients of its services.

About the speaker
Anne Irfan is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London (UCL). She is a historian whose work examines the lasting impact of colonialism on modern displacements. She is the author of Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System (available now from Columbia University Press).

Photo: Key at the entrance to the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank.  Credit: Karen (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Refuge and resistance: Palestinians and the global refugee regime | Dr Anne Irfan

Welcome Panel: Making Sanctuary a Reality in Oxford 
at
Oxford Sanctuary Fair 2023
11 May 2023
Oxford Town Hall

This free, all-day drop-in event aimed to connect refugees, students, and the local community. The Fair was open to everyone and provided an opportunity to learn more about refugee issues and how we can all make a difference.

It included panel discussions and interactive workshops featuring students, academics, activists, politicians, community leaders, and influencers, many of whom have experienced displacement first-hand.
Stalls from community organisations gave visitors a chance to meet those who are making a difference on the front line, and to find volunteering opportunities and practical actions to support refugees and asylum seekers in Oxford and beyond.

The Sanctuary Fair 2023 was a collaborative event hosted by Asylum Welcome, the Refugee Studies Centre (University of Oxford), and Oxford City Council.

Welcome Panel (10.30 - 11.15am) 
Making Sanctuary a Reality in Oxford 
Panelists:
1. Mark Goldring (Director, Asylum Welcome) 
2. Jan Royall (Principal, Somerville College, a College of Sanctuary, and Chair of the Conference of Colleges) 
3. Juliet Van Gyseghem (Oxford STAR Group) 
4. Yaroslava Bukhta (Ukraine Graduate Scholar, President of Oxford University Ukrainian Society) 
5. Cllr Dr Hosnieh Djafari-Marbini (City Council Migrant Champion) 
Moderator: Prof. Alexander Betts (Oxford University, Refugee Studies Centre)

Further information: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-sanctuary-fair-a-great-success

Oxford Sanctuary Fair 2023 | Making Sanctuary a Reality in Oxford

Politics Panel: The Political Landscape of Migrant Rights in the UK
at
Oxford Sanctuary Fair 2023
11 May 2023
Oxford Town Hall

This free, all-day drop-in event aimed to connect refugees, students, and the local community. The Fair was open to everyone and provided an opportunity to learn more about refugee issues and how we can all make a difference.

It included panel discussions and interactive workshops featuring students, academics, activists, politicians, community leaders, and influencers, many of whom have experienced displacement first-hand.
Stalls from community organisations gave visitors a chance to meet those who are making a difference on the front line, and to find volunteering opportunities and practical actions to support refugees and asylum seekers in Oxford and beyond.

The Sanctuary Fair 2023 was a collaborative event hosted by Asylum Welcome, the Refugee Studies Centre (University of Oxford), and Oxford City Council.

Politics Panel (11.15 - 12.00)
The Political Landscape of Migrant Rights in the UK
Panellists: 
1. Dr Hari Reed (Asylum Welcome / TVIA) 
2. Shaista Aziz (Oxford City Council) 
3. Sharmarke Dubow (Oxford University, Blavatnik School of Government) 
Moderator: Prof. Alexander Betts (Oxford University, Refugee Studies Centre)

Find more information at: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-sanctuary-fair-a-great-success

Oxford Sanctuary Fair | The Political Landscape of Migrant Rights in the UK

Seminar: Book launch for ‘Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp’
Speaker: Dr Melissa Gatter (University of Sussex)

RSC Seminar, 1 November 2023
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term 2023

About the seminar
Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. Melissa Gatter argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait – both for everyday services and for their return – without expectations for a better outcome.
Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp – not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future.
Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve.

About the speaker
Melissa Gatter is a lecturer in International Development at the University of Sussex, researching forced migration, aid, and time in the Middle East, and she received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020. She has also worked for leading aid agencies in Jordan, including Save the Children.

Book launch: Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp | Dr Melissa Gatter

RSC seminar, 17 January 2024
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2024
Series convened by Dr Catherine Briddick

ABOUT THE SEMINAR
Mutual aid, feminist economics and film in displacement affected communities. This research seminar will present a selection of findings, and short films, from qualitative and quantitative fieldwork conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar, and Pakistan.  

We present findings from the Protracted Displacement Economies project based at the University of Sussex. Find out more at https://www.displacementeconomies.org/

SPEAKERS
Professor Michael Collyer (University of Sussex)
Dr Ceri Oeppen (University of Sussex)
Dr Tahir Zaman (University of Sussex)
Dr Ali Ali (University of Sussex)
Dr Ayub Jan (University of Peshawar)

Photo: Market in Bole Michael, Addis Ababa. Credit: A Betts.

Beyond Livelihoods: A Protracted Displacement Economy Approach

RSC seminar, 31 January 2024
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2024
Series convened by Dr Catherine Briddick

Mini-Series: Refugee History, Human Rights and the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Convenor: Dr Catherine Briddick

This research-led seminar mini-series provides an opportunity to engage with current events in Israel and Gaza. Our speakers are scholars whose expertise and research illuminates issues relevant to the conflict. With them, we are able to discuss how displacement has shaped the history of Gaza and to explore the relationships between international humanitarian, refugee, and human rights law.

Consonant with the RSC’s commitment to build knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of forced migration, this series aims to encourage reflection and contribute to debate in academia and in practice.

‘there is no justification for studying, and attempting to understand, the causes of human suffering if the purpose of one’s study is not, ultimately, to find ways of relieving and preventing that suffering.’ Dr David Turton

About the Speaker
Dr Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler is Associate Professor in International Refugee Law at the University of Reading, School of Law, where he is the Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes and co-Chair of the LGBT+ staff network. Ruvi is an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple; Research Associate of the Refuge Studies Centre, University of Oxford; Editor of the Reporter and Co-convenor of the Migration and Asylum Section of the Society of Legal Scholars; Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative (Institute for Advance Legal Study, University of London) and Editor-in-Chief of its Working Paper Series. Ruvi's public engagements include serving as Chair of the Board of Trustees of New Europeans Association UK; Chair of the Oxford European Association; A Britain in Europe academic expert; and an advisory council member of Rene Cassin.

Displacement from Conflict: Old Realities, New Protections? | Dr Reuven Ziegler

Book launch: Becoming Adult on the Move: Migration Journeys, Encounters and Life Transitions

Wednesday, 21 February 2024, 5pm to 6pm
Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2024
Series convened by Dr Catherine Briddick

ABOUT THE BOOK
Becoming Adult on the Move: Migration Journeys, Encounters and Life Transitions (Elaine Chase, Nando Sigona and Dawn Chatty, eds, Palgrave Macmillan 2023 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-26534-1 )
This edited collection situates the migration of children and young people into Europe within a global framework of analysis and provides a holistic perspective that encompasses cultural media, ethnographic research and policy analysis. Drawing on a unique study of young unaccompanied migrants who subsequently became ‘adult’ within the UK and Italy, it examines their different trajectories and how they were impacted by their ability to secure legal status. Divided into three interlinked sections, it begins by examining the cultural repertoires about migration and adulthood to which migrants are sensitized in their countries of origin from a young age. This forms the contexts within which their direct experiences of turning 18 in a different country are explored. These combined insights are framed by an analysis of related policies which bureaucratically and institutionally shape these migratory experiences. This interdisciplinary volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of migration studies, international development, geography, sociology, anthropology, youth studies, law, education, health and wellbeing, social care and cultural studies.

SPEAKERS
Professor Elaine Chase (UCL): Becoming Adult on the Move – the project  
Professor Dawn Chatty (RSC, University of Oxford): Becoming Adult on the Move - cultural perspectives 
Migena Lala (Peer researcher) and Professor Elaine Chase: Insights from Albania 
Dr Tamsin Barber (Oxford Brookes University) and Dr Hai Nguyen (Independent researcher): Insights from Vietnam
Habib Rezaie (Leicester, UK): Becoming Adult on the Move – longitudinal research
Ouzra Karimi (University of Birmingham): Young Afghans negotiating adulthood through marriage in the UK  
Professor Nando Sigona (University of Birmingham): Becoming Adult on the Move – policy perspectives 
Chair: Dr Hiba Salem (RSC)

With apologies for the occasional problem with sound quality.

Book launch: Becoming Adult on the Move: Migration Journeys, Encounters and Life Transitions

RSC seminar, 8 May 2024
Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2024
Series convened by Professor Naohiko Omata and Professor Tom Scott-Smith

About the speaker
Professor Kristin Sandvik is a Research Professor in Humanitarian Studies at PRIO and a law professor at UiO. She co-founded and directed the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies. Professor Sandvick teaches ethics, sociology of law, legal tech, and AI and robot regulations. She leads the RCN-funded LAW22JULY: RIPPLES (SAMRISK) and Do No Harm: Ethical humanitarian Innovation (NORGLOBAL), and is part of RegulAir and Co-duties. Her book on Humanitarian Extractivism (Manchester University Press) was published in 2023. Her next book is on humanitarian regulation. 

Humanitarian Extractivism investigates the digital transformation of aid as a form of humanitarian extractivism. It focuses on how practices of data extraction shift power towards states, the private sector and humanitarians.

Digital initiatives aimed towards 'fixing' the humanitarian system, making it better and more secure, also create risk and harm for vulnerable individuals and communities. Central to the digital transformation of aid is the digital body - with digital identities becoming a prerequisite for receiving aid and protection - and the centralisation of vulnerability arising from enormous databases holding ever more humanitarian data. Cyber-attacks, human error and technological problems generate risks for humanitarians, but also mean that humanitarians themselves can put populations in need at risk.

The book explores new humanitarian spaces and practices such as the humanitarian drone airspace, wearable innovation challenges and ethics in global disaster innovation labs.

Humanitarian extractivism: the digital transformation past, present, future | Prof Kristin Sandvik

Book launch: The Politics of Crisis-Making: Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon | Dr Estella Carpi
RSC seminar, 29 May 2024
Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2024
Series convened by Professor Naohiko Omata and Professor Tom Scott-Smith

About the book
Traditionally, humanitarianism is considered a nonpolitical urgent response to human suffering. However, this characterization ignores the politics that create and are created by the crises and the increasingly long-term dimension of relief.
In The Politics of Crisis-Making (Indiana University Press, 2023) by shedding light on how humanitarian practice becomes enmeshed with diverse forms of welfare and development, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises affect the social identity and membership of the displaced. Her ethnographic research in Lebanon brings to light interactions among aid workers, government officials, internally displaced citizens, migrants, and refugees after the 2006 war in Beirut's southern suburbs and during the 2011-2013 arrival of refugees from Syria to the Akkar District (northern Lebanon). By documenting different cultures, modalities, and traditions of assistance, Carpi offers a full account of how the politics of crisis-making play out in Lebanon.
An important read, The Politics of Crisis-Making shows that it is not crisis per se, but rather the crisis as official discourse and management that are able to reshuffle societies, while engendering unequal political, moral, and nationality-based economies.

About the speaker
Dr Estella Carpi is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies at the Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction, University College London. Over the last decade, her research has mainly focused on social responses to conflict-induced humanitarian assistance in the Levant and Turkey. More broadly, her academic work has revolved around identity politics in crisis-affected settings, anthropology of the state and humanitarianism, and the overlapping of welfare and emergency relief. She is currently a 2020-25 Global Young Academy Member, where she co-led the At-Risk Scholars Initiative between 2021 and 2023, and actively participates in the Harmonising Reason with Sensibility and the Anti-Discrimination Group.
	In 2016, she was awarded the “Mobility, Displacement, and Forced Migration in the Middle East” research grant from the Centre for International and Regional Studies (Georgetown University-Qatar), to undertake a study on the politics of urban livelihoods in the border economies of Southeastern Turkey and Northern Lebanon. She is the author of The Politics of Crisis-Making: Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023), and of Specchi Scomodi. Etnografia delle Migrazioni Forzate nel Libano Contemporaneo (Mimesis, 2018).

Book launch: The Politics of Crisis-Making | Dr Estella Carpi

Skilled worker visas for refugees – a qualitative evaluation of the UK’s Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot

Speakers: Associate Professor Olivier Sterck (RSC), Marina Brizar (UK & EU Director, Talent Beyond Boundaries), Sarah Walder (Global Monitoring and Evaluation Lead, Talent Beyond Boundaries), and Jana Al Mawed (TBB alumni & TBB’s UK Talent Sourcing Lead)

RSC seminar, 5 June 2024
Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2024
Series convened by Professor Naohiko Omata and Professor Tom Scott-Smith

This seminar will present findings from the report ‘Skilled Worker Visas for Refugees: An Evaluation of the UK's Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot (DTMP)’, by Nour Moussa and Olivier Sterck.
There has been growing recognition of labour migration as a complementary solution for refugees and displaced people in recent years. Several pilots and programmes have emerged to match displaced people in the Global South with employers in the Global North in need of their skills and then facilitate their movement to these countries. One such example is the Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot (DTMP) announced in July 2021 by the Home Office, in partnership with the charity Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB).

TBB was established in 2016 out of the simple idea that displaced people have skills and talents, and can positively contribute to companies and communities globally when barriers to their mobility are removed. TBB uses the Talent Catalog, with over 100,000 registered people, to match skilled people in displacement with public-service providers or private companies and then works with employers, governments, and civil society to facilitate displaced people’s migration.

The DTMP was launched in October 2021 and the first candidate arrived in the UK in December 2021. Initially, the DTMP aimed to move 50–100 displaced persons and their family members from Jordan and Lebanon to the UK as skilled migrants in non-healthcare roles by the end of October 2023. The pilot has since been extended until 1 November 2024. Utilising the Skilled Worker migration route, it will continue to provide a pathway for up to 200 skilled displaced people to come to the UK. Refugees and displaced people of any nationality or location are now eligible to benefit from the Displaced Talent Mobility Pilot. This report assesses the achievements, impacts, and sustainability of the DTMP. It draws on qualitative research, including interviews with individuals who moved through the pilot, as well as staff from employing organisations, TBB, the Home Office, and partner organisations.

Skilled worker visas for refugees | Olivier Sterck et al.

RSC seminar, 16 October 2024
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2024
Speaker: Tom Scott-Smith

Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.

In this talk, Tom Scott-Smith (RSC Director) draws on his new book, Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Stanford University Press, 2024) to discuss how humanitarians, architects, and government authorities have sought to provide shelter to refugees. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, he will reflect on the political implications of these shelters and open up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. Building on the conclusions from his book, he will explore how the principle of autonomy can offer a fruitful approach to sensitive and inclusive shelter for refugees.

Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Book Launch)

RSC Seminar, 6 November 2024
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2024
Speaker: Ashwiny Kistnareddy

Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger examines the cultural production of two generations of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children: the 1.5 generation (those who were children when they arrived in the host country) and the second generation (those who were born to refugees in the host country). Analysing a broad range of non-fiction and fiction writing by these two generations in France, Canada and the USA, this book discusses how they grapple with their positionality as refugee(s’) children and the attendant problematics of loss. How they recuperate this loss by deploying notions such as home, hauntings and hunger is central to this analysis. Refugee Afterlives identifies the tools deployed by the 1.5 and second generation, tests their limits while understanding that these writers’ creations are constantly changing and shifting paradigms and will continue to be so over the next decades. Each writer is finding their own voice and pathway(s) and while these may sometimes overlap and contain commonalities, afterlives by default imply plurality and differences. This book offers ways of examining these texts, juxtaposing them, contrasting them, putting them in dialogue with each other, underlining their differences, but ultimately demonstrating that there is much to be gained in seeing how 1.5ers and the so-called second generation Vietnamese refugee writers contribute to a wider discussion of Vietnamese refugee(s’) children and what happens to them after resettlement.

About the speaker
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, ODID, University of Oxford. She is also Sir William Golding Research Fellow at Brasenose College and lecturer at Christ Church College. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She has published peer-reviewed articles on gender, migration, refugees, postcolonial identities and exile. She is the author of Locating Hybridity (2015), Migrant Masculinities (2021), co-editor of Catching up with Time (2022). She is currently working on a monograph on refugee children’s narratives.

Refugee Afterlives: Home, Hauntings, and Hunger

RSC Seminar, 13 November 2024
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2024
Speaker: Dr Christel Querton (Wallscourt Fellow in Law, University of the West of England)

About the speaker
Christel Querton is a Wallscourt Fellow in Law at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and a member of the Research in Public International Law research group. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative, University of London.

Christel’s research focuses on international refugee law, in particular the protection of persons fleeing contemporary armed conflicts and refugee women. She has published in the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, the International and Comparative Law Quarterly and the Refugee Survey Quarterly. Her monograph titled "Conflict Refugees: European Union law and Practice" was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The book is based on her PhD research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

Christel co-convenes the Women in Refugee Law (WiRL) Network, which aims to recentre refugee women within refugee law, policy and practice and has led various research projects, including that of evaluating country guidance issued by the European Union Agency for Asylum.

In addition to her academic work, Christel has prior experience as a barrister practicing asylum, immigration and human rights law within the UK. She has strong ties to the charity sector, having served in advisory and trustee roles for organizations focused on refugee and asylum issues.

Conflict Refugees: European Union Law and Practice

RSC Seminar, 27 November 2024
RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2024
Speakers: Professor Dawn Chatty (Refugee Studies Centre) and Professor Annika Rabo (Stockholm University) 

This seminar presents very preliminary and partial findings from an ongoing British Academy-funded study to examine the impulses which led so many to volunteer their time and energy to welcome and make Syrians and other refugees feel ‘at home’ upon arrival in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Rather than focus on the suffering of Syrians and other displaced people seeking safety (Chatty, 2018; Rabo et al, 2021; Beck, 2021; Cantat, 2021), it turns to interrogate the motivations which drove so many citizens and residents to step forward and be generous to those in need (Chatty, 2017). In the UK there was little media sympathy for such hospitality whereas in Sweden media was generally very supportive. These two study sites offer an opportunity to study volunteering to come to the aid of Syrians in both a relatively hostile policy environment and a sympathetic one.

Anthropology of Good: Exploring Volunteerism in the 2015 European Refugee Crisis

RSC seminar, 29 January 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2025
Speaker: Sana Murrani (Univeristy of Plymouth)

Refuge-Making: Stories from Iraq

RSC seminar, 6 February 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2025
Speaker: Professor Audrey Macklin (University of Toronto)

No Exit: Preventing Exit to Prevent Entry

RSC seminar, 19 February 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2025
Speaker: Professor Mary Bosworth (Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford)

Supply chain justice: The logistics of British border control

RSC seminar, 26 February 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2025
Speaker: Aamna Mohdi (Community affairs correspondent, The Guardian)

Scattered: The making and unmaking of a refugee. A conversation with Aamna Mohdin

RSC seminar, 12 March 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary term 2025
Speaker: Professor Kelly Greenhill (Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Tufts University, and Visiting Professor and Resident Senior Fellow, MIT)

'Wicked' Challenges in Migration Management: Weaponization, Politicization, and Hostile Influence Operations

RSC seminar, 7 May 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2025
Speaker: Dr Miriam Bradley (Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies, University of Manchester)

Localization in the Rohingya refugee response

RSC seminar, 14 May 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2025
Speaker: Dr Bronte Alexander (Research Fellow in Political Geography, Collegium Helveticum, Zurich)

Governing Migration and Mobility: Military-Humanitarianism at Brazil’s Northern Frontier

RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2025
Wednesday, 28 May 2025
Speakers: Emily Arnold-Fernández (Refugee Law Initiative, University of London, and Forced Migration Review); Yusra Herzi (PILnet)

Refugees at work: Ending exploitation, advancing justice

RSC seminar, 4 June 2025
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2025
Speaker: Professor Olukunle Owolabi (Associate Professor of Political Science, Villanova University)

Ruling Emancipated Slaves and Indigenous Subjects: The Divergent Legacies of Forced Settlement and Colonial Occupation in the Global South

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term, 15 October 2025

Speaker: Dr Anne Irfan (Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London)

About this talk:
Israel’s assault on Gaza, which was launched after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, is now widely recognised as a genocide. Yet the violence in Gaza, and Palestine-Israel as a whole, did not begin in October 2023. This talk takes its history back to the original ethnic cleansing of 1948 (known in Arabic as the nakba or catastrophe), when 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced, with more than 200,000 fleeing to Gaza. Over subsequent decades, Israeli military occupations caused further displacements, juxtaposed with immobilising measures that increasingly confined Palestinians to the Gaza Strip’s 141 square miles. The situation in Gaza today, whereby Israeli forces have displaced virtually the entire population and the government is openly planning their expulsion, can only be fully understood within this long-term trajectory. This talk will trace the historical antecedents of displacement and immobility in Gaza, arguing that the Strip is a site of modern refugee history at its most extreme.

A short history of the Gaza Strip

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term, 22 October 2025
Speaker: David Owen (Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton)

Accompanying slides: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/events/davidowenseminarslides221025

About this talk:
This talk explores the conceptions of solidarity at work in practices of solidarity with ‘precarious migrants’ who are engaged in contesting the government of transnational movement and in virtue of this activity are exposed to border violence. In doing so, it aims to shed light both on how to conceptualise the phenomenon of solidarity with precarious migrants and on the relationship of practices of solidarity to displacement as process, condition and, finally, a contemporary form of life. David Owen will argue that we can distinguish between different modalities of solidarity that stand in different relationships to governmental power and to displacement, and that doing so helps to clarify both the ethical and political stakes of solidarity with precarious migrants.

Displacement, solidarity, counter-government

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term, 29 October 2025
Speaker: Dr Alvina Hoffman (Lecturer in Diplomatic Studies at SOAS University of London)

Accompanying slides: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/events/alvinahoffmanseminarslides291025

About this talk
The talk is part of a draft chapter of a book manuscript on human rights elites at the United Nations, which follows the biographical trajectories of UN experts in special human rights missions. It will focus on Felix Ermacora, an Austrian human rights expert, international lawyer and delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, who was part of the first cohort of independent human rights experts at the UN. For 27 years, he served on various human rights fact-finding missions at the UN: the first one on apartheid in South Africa, followed by the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Chile and Afghanistan. He established himself as Austria’s leading human rights expert in the 1950s through his academic work and passionate advocacy for the rights of the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol. The chapter builds on his travelogues, interviews with his widow and a former student, as well as archival sources from the UN and in Innsbruck. It highlights the tensions between state diplomacy and experts, headquarters and encounters in the field with dissidents, refugees and politicians, bureaucracy and adventure, and a sense of futility and deep belief in the cause – laying the foundations for today’s UN special procedures system.

About the speaker
Dr Alvina Hoffmann is a lecturer in Diplomatic Studies and Deputy Director of the Centre of International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in human rights and humanitarianism, the sociology of elites and experts, transnational professionals, socio-legal studies and the UN. Currently, she is working on her first monograph titled Speaking for the Universal: Human Rights Elites in World Politics. Her research has recently appeared in the Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Global Studies Quarterly. She won the Best Article in the European Journal of International Relations in 2024 prize, the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Article in 2024, and the Best Dissertation prize of the German United Nations Association in 2023. She holds a PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, a Master’s in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in International Relations from LSE.

Human rights elites at the UN: Felix Ermacora & the first human rights fact finding missions

Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture,  5 November 2025
Speaker: Lea Ypi (Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics)

About this talk:
Lea Ypi reads from her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined and reflects on the enduring legacies of migration, displacement, and forced removal. Beginning with the story of her grandmother in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, she explores how past experiences of exile and resettlement help us confront the moral and political challenges of migration in our own time.

About the speaker:
Lea Ypi (FBA, FAE) is Ralph Miliband Professor in Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Indignity: A Life Reimagined and Free: Coming of Age at the end of History, both published by Penguin Press as well as Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, published by Oxford University Press. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages and won numerous prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Slightly Foxed First Biography Award, the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and a Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement.

Migration and displacement: My grandmother, Lausanne, and some lessons for the present

RSC Public Seminar Series, Michaelmas Term, 29 October 2025
Speaker: Larissa Fast (Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies at the University of Manchester)

Accompanying slides:  https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/files/files-1/larissa-fast-1

About this talk 
Attacks on healthcare have captured international attention in recent years, as the bombing of hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere signal how readily conflict parties neglect their obligations under international humanitarian law. In Sudan and Myanmar, medical staff have been at the forefront of resistance movements to military regimes. While especially prominent in armed conflict, the threat to healthcare is not confined to conflict; the COVID 19 pandemic saw a rise in violence towards health workers globally. What are the dynamics of this violence, and what does it mean for the healthcare system, for conflict-affected populations, and for international law, particularly given the seismic shifts affecting the humanitarian sector? This seminar will examine these questions, drawing on findings from the Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare project.

About the speaker
Larissa Fast is Professor of Humanitarian and Conflict Studies and former Executive Director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute at the University of Manchester. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of the worlds of academia, policy, and practice. Her research addresses two fundamental problems: how best to protect civilians, particularly those who intervene in violent conflict, and how to make such intervention more effective, ethical, and responsive to local needs and circumstances. In addition to her monograph Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), she has published dozens of peer-reviewed articles and policy reports. She is Principal Investigator of the Researching the Impact of Attacks on Healthcare (RIAH) project (2019-2026), and co-Investigator on a project examining the ethics of research in conflict and disaster settings (2023-2025). Her research has been funded by the UK FCDO, British Academy, Research Council of Norway, the Wellcome Trust, US Agency for International Development, US Institute of Peace, and the Swiss Development Corporation.

Attacking health: Understanding the dynamics and broader impacts of violence against healthcare

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term, 4 February 2026

Speaker: Dr Aristel Skrbic (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Law and a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Trinity College, Cambridge)

About this talk:
Ever since the 2015 “migration crisis”, the EU has pursued a wide range of aggressive migration policies which can collectively be described as the continued construction of “Fortress Europe”. Much of the analysis and critique in law and philosophy to date has, understandably, focused on the immediate consequences this has for migrants and asylum seekers, often with deadly outcomes. More recently, there is an emergent debate that analyses how these policies undermine the EU’s constitutional values, such as the rule of law, democracy, and fundamental rights. 

In this talk, Dr Skrbic pushes the conversation beyond the black letter of EU constitutional law and analyses the connection between these migration policies and the deeper level of the constitutional imaginary, the philosophical ideas and beliefs which underpin the project of European constitutionalisation. His hypothesis is that by shifting attention from the content of these migration policies and instead focusing on their place and method, by paying heed to the where and the how of Fortress Europe, two preliminary connections between migration policies and the EU’s liberal constitutional imaginary can be drawn. The first is that the informalisation of migration policies undermines the idea of European integration as a project of “integration through law”. Second, the territorial fragmentation that results from these migration policies undermines one of the deepest aspirations of European integration, namely, to unify Europe and overcome the ‘walls’ and ‘curtains’ that divided the continent in the 20th century. Thus, the talk traces the impact of Fortress Europe migration policies on the broader project of European integration.  


The price of Fortress Europe: Critical reflections on the EU’s migration policies and constitutional horizons

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term, 28 January 2026

Speaker: Dr Hannah Pool (Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies)

About this talk: 
To seek asylum, people often have to cross borders undocumented, embarking on perilous trajectories. Due to the war in Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban, and severe human rights violations, over the past decades thousands of people have risked their lives to seek safety. By what means do they make these journeys, especially when they lack money and passports? Over the course of three years, Hannah Pool accompanied a group of Afghan friends and families as they attempted "The Game" - Game zadan: the route to Europe to seek asylum. The resulting ethnography follows them across their entire trajectories: through Iran, Turkey, Greece, and along the so-called Balkan route. In each place, Pool details the economic interactions and social relationships essential for acquiring, saving, borrowing, spending, and exchanging money to facilitate their undocumented migration routes. 

The Game bridges economic sociology and migration studies to illustrate how migrants decide to trust people to facilitate their movement along these routes, focusing particularly on debt, special monies, bribes, donations, and gift-giving. Throughout the migration trajectory, relationships with family, fellow migrants, smugglers, humanitarian actors, and border control officials shape and are shaped by access to financial resources. Ultimately, the book highlights the dangers in undocumented border-crossing and delves into the core of what it means to flee: Who has the means to escape dangerous conditions to seek asylum?


Game: The Economy of Undocumented Migration from Afghanistan to Europe

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term, 25 February 2026

Speakers: Professor Dawn Chatty (Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University) and Audra Morris (Research Associate on the Anthropology of Good project)

About this talk: 
This presentation explores the impulses which led so many to volunteer their time and energy to welcome and make Syrians feel ‘at home’ upon arrival in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Rather than focus on the suffering of Syrians seeking safety (Chatty, 2018: Rabo et al, 2021: Beck, 2021; Cantat, 2021), it turns to interrogate the motivations which drove so many citizens and residents, alike, to step forward and be generous to those in need (Chatty, 2017). These two study sites offered an opportunity to study volunteering to come to the aid of Syrians and other asylum seekers in both a relatively hostile policy and media environment and a sympathetic one. Framing the study from primarily an anthropological perspective, rather than from within the disciplines of psychology, religious studies, or economics provides an opportunity to explore notions of social duty, of doing the right thing, and of humanity.

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term, 25 February 2026
Speakers: Rebecca Buxton (Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy, University of Bristol) and Samuel Ritholtz (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, University of Oxford)

About this talk:
The global refugee regime has shifted under our feet. Over the last forty years, international asylum practices have expanded to include the queer and trans displaced. At least thirty-seven countries now recognize LGBTIQ refugees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, with some states providing specialized support. Yet amid this expansion, backlash has intensified against refugee protection as well as the hard-earned rights of LGBTIQ people. In this disquieting context, the protection of LGBTIQ refugees remains partial and exclusionary.

The Way Out examines the complexities of queer and trans displacement around the world. Centring personal narratives of LGBTIQ refugees, the book exposes the shortcomings of an international protection regime that is unable to address the harms that drive displacement. Rebecca Buxton and Samuel Ritholtz's analysis of the stakes of queer and trans inclusion in accounts of displacement justice offers a vibrant example of theory brought to life.



The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge - Book Launch

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term, 18 February 2026

Speaker: Dr Kalathmika Natarajan (Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at the University of Exeter and co-director of the Exeter South Asia Centre)

About this talk:
This talk recovers the histories and legacies of ‘coolie’ migrants as foundational to Indian diplomacy. Drawing on multi-archival research spanning the vast geographies of indenture and labour migration from India to Ceylon, the Caribbean, and Britain, I argue that Indian notions of the international realm were shaped by the prolific if ‘undesirable’ mobility of labourers and remained a space of anxiety defined by a caste-coded paranoia over the figure of the coolie. Through such a paradigm, my book addresses the longstanding neglect of caste and labour migration in Indian diplomatic history. It thereby provides a bottom-up approach to diplomatic studies and international relations that centres the experiences of migrants who have for too long been simply regarded as recipients and ‘problems’ of diplomacy.

Coolie Migrants, Indian Diplomacy: Caste, Class, and Indenture Abroad, 1914-67

The Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) aims to build knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of forced migration in order to help improve the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.

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