Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh awarded Cornell-UCL grant for work on migration and refuge

The project builds on the interdisciplinary strengths that both UCL and Cornell have in migration and refugee studies.

It aims to foster new opportunities for dialogue and sustainable collaboration among academics, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars, producing both academic and public-facing outputs.

The Cornell-UCL Migration and Refuge Working Group seeks to advance understanding of borders, mobility, displacement and refuge by taking a critical, interdisciplinary approach to migration and refugee studies.

To do this, the project responds both to the realities of migration in the global age, and the longer-term histories of policy and scholarship on borders and asylum that have typically centralised Western and statist perspectives rather than prioritising 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 recognise refugees as producers of knowledge
• Refuge - rather than fetishisation of the refugee - as a starting point of analysis

Professor 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. "

The project’s Principal Investigators are:

• UCL PI: Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL-Geography and UCL-Migration Research Unit
• Cornell Co-PI: Saida Hodzic, Anthropology, A&S
• Cornell Co-PI: Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Fellow

More information

• Refugee Hosts
• Southern Responses to Displacement