Rebuilding Education in Areas of Armed Conflict: The Case of Syria

Since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, more than 45% of the population has been forced into displacement, of which almost half are children. For a large part of the Syrian population, access to education has been interrupted.

In her study, Mirey tries to identify the opportunities that could be offered by information and communications technology to guarantee access to formal and non-formal education to Syrian children affected by the armed conflict. Based on fieldwork in Lebanon between 2013 and 2018, Mirey will present findings on how ICTs can facilitate access to education for Syrian children in different ways, both physically and remotely. She will also highlight the role of these technologies in improving and facilitating communication between different actors including teachers, parents, and formal educational administrations. In addition, she will explain how ICTs is used in emergency situations to share information on the safety of children.

These findings can offer a pathway to find more stable and long-term solutions for children with limited access to education due to armed conflicts and in other emergency situations.

A light lunch will be served! All welcome!

 

 

Mirey is a PhD candidate at the Autonumus University of Barcelona and her research focuses on the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education in emergencies.

 

Time: Thursday 17th of October 2019, 12.30 – 13.30

Place: Bergen Global CMI/UiB, Jekteviksbakken 31

PhD Relay – 17.09.2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earlier this week, IMER organized a PhD relay where PhD candidates from various disciplines and across departments were offered the opportunity to discuss their research and receive feedback from IMER board members. The session aimed at furthering dialogue between senior and junior researchers working on migration.

Participants:

IMER Board Members and Affiliated Researchers

Members from IMER Junior Scholars Network

  • Amany Selim, Department of Sociology, “Political Activism in the Context of Recent Displacement: Exploring Trajectories of Political Engagement among Syrian Activists in Europe. A Case of Two Cities”
  • Anders Rubing, SKOK, “Infrastructures of Resilience and Security”
  • Ann Cathrin Corrales-Øverlid, Department of Foreign Languages, “A Culinary  Quest: Peruvian Women Entrepreneurs in Southern California Negotiating Home and Belonging”
  • Cathrine Talleraas, CMI/PRIO, Institutionalising Transnationalism: The National Welfare System’s Encounter with People who lead Transnational Lives”
  • Kari Hagatun, Department of Education,The Educational Situation for Roma Pupils in Norway: Silenced Narratives on Schooling and Future”
  • Joanna Spyra, Department of Archeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion,“Madness as Resistance: Disciplining Sexual Behavior of Jewish Immigrant Women in Argentina in the Interwar Period”

We are indebted to Kari Anne Drangsland, the PhD representative on IMER board, for her efforts in planning and organising the event.

We are grateful to everyone who could attend and participate!

Call for Papers – One-day Conference for Junior Scholars of Migration and Ethnic Relations

The IMER Junior scholar network is organizing a one day conference for junior scholars working on topics related to international migration & ethnic relations.

The conference will take place at the University of Bergen, on December 6th, 2019. 

To read the full call, please click here

To register, please, fill in the online registration form

IMER/DIGSSCORE Lunch Seminar 10.09: Immigrant Narratives from a Psychological Strength Perspective: The Use of a Survey as a Tool for voicing and humanizing Experiences

Torreiro-Casal will describe findings from an online survey developed by UC Davis students using a psychological strength-based perspective. Monica will describe cultural constructs, migration experiences and immigrant’s perceptions on current anti-migrant rhetoric. The rational for using this survey will be discussed as well as the relevance of collecting qualitative data. Further, Monica will describe the current analysis of data and purpose of codifying themes from those narratives. The analysis of these narratives so far has helped to identify immigrant’s strengths and psychological protective factors. These findings contribute to voice counter narratives to the current political climate in the USA. 

Lunch will be served on first-come first-served basis.

 

 Dr. Monica Torreiro-Casal holds a PhD in counseling psychology from Northeastern University, Boston, MA. Currently, Monica is affiliated with the Chicano/a studies Department at the University of California in Davis where she teaches and researches on mental health-related issues with vulnerable communities. Her research focuses on collecting narratives (survey, interviews, art/media) and conducting qualitative research to document the undocumented narratives of marginalized individuals.

The event is organized by IMER and DIGSSCORE.

For more info, please click here

Time: Tuesday 10th of September 2019, 12.00 – 13.00

Place: The Corner Room, DIGGSCORE, Rosenbergsgaten 35 

Call News for Postdoctoral Researchers

There is a vacancy for a postdoctoral position at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, linked to an international Horizon 2020 research project focusing on the right to international protection, the global governance of refugee protection, and the public recognition of refugee rights. The postdoctoral research fellow is expected to contribute to the project team’s research from the perspectives of political theory and multilevel global governance as well as participating in research leadership and international project coordination tasks.

Deadline for application: September 11, 2019

For information, please click here

 

Open Seminar at SKOK: Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides

Open Seminar at SKOK

Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides

Time: Wednesday and Thursday, 28th – 29th of August 2019

Place: SKOK, Parkveien 9

About the seminar

Refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples are typically constructed as separate categories within nation-states, and thus are studies in relation to white “natives”, but seldom in relation to one another. Immigrants, indigenous people and refugees are conventionally imagined as communities with little in common.

This seminar, jointly organized by SKOK and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley will tackle the question: how do these communities, and the fields of study focused on these communities, intersect? A key question for the seminar will be how these communities are imagined to diverge through conceptions of time and space, and how such imaginaries are gendered. The participants will explore convergence and divergence among these three populations with respect to legal status and the attendant social and material contexts as well as cultural/political discourses and cultural forms and practices, particularly the “ground up” imaginaries and practices of natives, immigrants, and refugees.

Programme:

28th of August

9:30 – 10.00 Welcome, about the project Christine M.Jacobsen and Leti Volpp

10.00 – 11.00 Leti Volpp, Native/Immigrant/Refugee: US Legal Imaginaries

11.00 – 12.00 Marry-Anne Karlsen, How Long Time is Enough? Irregularity, Time, and Belonging in Norway

12:00 – 13:00 Debarati Sanyal, Messengers from Melilla’s Border

13:00 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:00 Kari Jegerstedt, Caught between Colonial Violence and Eco/Tourism: A Second Lool at Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000)

15:00 – 16:00 Stine Bang Svensen, Remapping Land: Indigenous Lands, Colonization, and Migration

16:00 – 17:00 Common Discussion

29th of August

09.30 – 10:30 Kari Anne Drangsland, Troubling the Periodization of Waiting

10:30 – 11.30 Fantasia Painter, Crossing Paths in the Borderlands: Indigenous Life and US Militarization at US-Mexico Border

11:30 – 12:30 Astrid Dankertsen, Colonial Hauntings in the Sami/Norwegian inbetween Space

12:30 – 13:00 Common Discussion

For more info, please click here

BSRS 2019 Keynote: The Borders of Outreach: Do we need to reframe the Public Role of Academics?

Scholars are increasingly called upon to engage with and have an impact on the wider world. Yet reaching out is not always that simple, as Ruben Andersson has come to note in his research on migration, borders, and security. Indeed, these political fields are illustrative of a deeper problem of outreach faced by many academics today: which messages and audiences should we prioritise, and how may our findings and analyses translate into a crowded and fractured public debate?

In this talk, Ruben Andersson reflects on his own experience of crossing the borders between academia, policy, the media and advocacy, arguing for the need to take back control over the ways in which we engage. Instead of finding ourselves captured by more powerful interests, answering pre-set policy questions on a given problem, he puts focus on how we may help switch the parameters of debate – including by asking new questions altogether.

 

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and associate professor at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He has written extensively on the anthropology of borders, migration, and security, and is the author of Illegality (2014) and No Go World (2019).

 

The session will be moderated by associate professor Synnøve Bendixsen.

Time: Tuesday 18th of June 2019, 17.00 – 18.00

Place: Auditorium 4, Faculty of Law

IMER Lunch Seminar 23.05: Home Accommodation of Asylum Seekers in Finland: Solidarity and Resistance

In Finland, like in other European countries, civic mobilization for supporting migrants and defending the right to asylum have proliferated since the so-called asylum ‘crisis’. Since the autumn of 2015, home accommodation of asylum seekers has become a popular way to assist asylum seekers and express solidarity amongst Finnish people.

For this IMER lunch seminar, Paula Merikoski from the University of Helsinki, examines this form of hospitality as a way for people to contest tightening asylum policies. By drawing on interviews with hosts, she argues that this phenomenon blurs the boundaries between public and private, and consolidates the understanding of the private home as a political site. She will present findings focusing on what motivated people to open their homes, and show how hosting can be a politicising experience for hosts. By opening their doors to asylum seekers, citizens take part in the debate over who is welcome to the country. 

 

A light lunch will be served!

 

  Paula Merikoski is a PhD candidate in sociology at University of Helsinki. In her PhD project she is investigating the hospitable social movement of home accommodation of asylum seekers in Finland. Paula is part of the research project Struggles over Home and Citizenship. Neighborhood Solidarities as a response to Asylum ‘Crisis’ (University of Helsinki) and the NORDHOST research project (University of Oslo).

Time: Thursday 23rd of May 2019, 12.30 – 13.30

Place: Bergen Global CMI/UiB, Jekteviksbakken 31

 

IMER Seminar 15.05: The Design Politics of the Passport

In this seminar, Mahmoud Keshavarz will present his recently published book, The Design of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent. It is an interdisciplinary study of the passport and practices as a means of uncovering the workings of what he calls ‘design politics’. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects.

Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others – and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.

 Mahmoud Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. He is the co-founder of Decolonizing Design group and co-editor-in-chief of Design and Cultural Journal.

This seminar is organized by IMER in cooperation with the at the WAIT-project at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK).

Time: Wednesday 15th of May 2019, 10.00 – 11.30

Place: SKOK, Parkveien 9

IMER Lunch Seminar 11.04: NGOs in Refugee Camps: Accountability for Human Rights Violations

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work closely with refugees by providing services and assistance. However, refugees might also be subjected to misconduct by NGOs. In such a scenario, how can NGOs be held accountable for wrongful acts?

For this IMER lunch seminar, Marianne Nerland from the Faculty of Law at UiB will present preliminary findings from her PhD project which explores recourses available to refugees seeking justice against NGOs. By drawing on interviews conducted with refugees as well as aid workers in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, Marianne will argue that there are serious legal obstacles that refugees face when wanting to file complaints against NGOs. This case highlights the need for an enhanced structure for NGO accountability in refugee camps.

A light lunch will be served! All welcome!

 Marianne Nerland is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, UiB

Time: Thursday 11th of April 2019, 12.30 – 13.30

Place: Bergen Global CMI/UiB, Jekteviksbakken 31