Alisha Mathers reports on her participation in the International Summer School in Forced Migration in July 2022.
Situated at the intersection of English Literature and Refugee Studies, my PhD project has required an exploration of subjects beyond my expertise such as the legal, historical, ethnographic, philosophical, and political aspects of refugeedom.
While presenting at conferences on Refugee Studies gave me some opportunities to have my research questioned by experts from the above fields, the categorisation of panels often placed me in a room with those whose projects also examined refugee literature. I saw this aspect of conferences to be limiting as I wanted to know which elements of the fields outside of my literary knowledge would be relevant to explore to deepen and strengthen my analysis.
Created as a space for an ‘interdisciplinary and participative approach to the study of forced migration’ (RSC), the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre International Online School in Forced Migration offered the opportunity I was looking for to widen my perspective of refugee studies while also providing an opportunity to network with policymakers, lawyers, aid workers and other academic researchers in the field working around the world.
Taught by leading scholars in Refugee Studies, the summer school explored the refugee crisis from three angles: law, politics, and anthropology, hosting modules on each approach alongside two optional modules of which I chose The Colonial Legacies of the Refugee Crisis, and Citizenship Stripping in the Global North. Each module allowed for an in-depth examination of case studies with both lectures from the academics and small group discussions with experts from a range of fields. I found the law module to be particularly fruitful for the progression of my project.
Due to the UK-focus of my project, I was familiar with UK immigration law from The Aliens Act 1905 to the recent Nationality and Borders Act. As I do not have a background in law yet examine representations of refugees coming from outside of the UK, the module on International Law and Refugee Protection was helpful to my conceptualisation of refugee legal belonging.
As my project adopts Andrew Nelson’s (2020) view that homemaking is not an end to displacement, but rather a place in which refugees can make sense of their loss; I valued gaining a better understanding of refugee protection around the world to better grasp the nuances of the refugee homemaking experience. For example, the law module challenged my approach to legal documents such as the 1951 Refugee Convention.
Having not come from a legal background, I had not critically evaluated how the convention had been interpreted throughout its history, nor had I considered which groups and cases it fails to acknowledge. In this sense, the module equipped me with more considerate and accurate language to discuss the relevant refugee legislation in my project.
Overall, the summer school provided me with a critical introduction to the legal, political, and anthropological approaches to refugee studies that I needed to understand and explore these vital perspectives more confidently. I am grateful to the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership for supporting my research needs by funding my place on the summer school.
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