Research

Completed projects

BUDD Camp

Through the use of different methodological instruments, this research tries to gather the complexity concerning the dimension of home in migrants’ experience. 
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/development/buddcamp

Pathways to Education for Women Refugees and Migrants in London

This 2017-2019 project was part of the on-going cross-departmental initiative of the Refuge in a Moving World (RIMW) network. Since 2015, RiMW has been coordinating UCL-wide staff and student activities in support of refugees and developing ways the UCL community can support refugees and migrants to access and participate in higher education. Members of the RiMW education sub-committee lead this project. Funded by the UCL Grand Challenges Programme, this project developed a model for collaboration between the UCL community and London-based charities working with women refugees and migrants, synthesising these groups’ expertise to design a short course aimed at strengthening pathways to education for women who are refugees or forced migrants in London. The project facilitated a series of ‘information exchange’ meetings to map the challenges that refugees and migrants face when seeking to access education, as well as their existing skills and knowledge. Based on these findings, we designed a short course to engage migrants and refugees directly, providing them with further skills, understanding and confidence.
UCL team: Dr Claudia Lapping, IOE; Prof Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, UCL-Geography; Dr Rachel Rosen, IOE; Dr Amy North, IOE; Raphaela Armbruster, CLIE; Dr Shaista Aziz; Phd © Iman Azzi, IOE; Phd © Sara Joiko, IOE

Refugee Self-Reliance and Humanitarian Action in Urban Markets

As protraction of crises increasingly becomes a long term drive for urban change and a challenge for city governance and infrastructures, this research project focused on “urban-itarian” settings: that is the interactional moment between the urban and the humanitarian, when cities have become home to humanitarian actors and de facto refugees, and urban and humanitarian infrastructures provide and negotiate basic services and livelihoods. The project investigated how human, social, and economic relations, exchange and consumption experiences can better inform humanitarian policies and practices, both of which regulate access and relations to services, labour, and resources.
The project team was composed by Dr. Estella Carpi (jointly based at DPU and HAT), Dr. Andrea Rigon (DPU), Dr. Camillo Boano (DPU), and Dr. Cassidy Johnson (DPU), and Fernando Espada (HAT), Sophie Dicker (HAT), Dr. Jessica Field (HAT).
Affiliation: This project was developed by The Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit,  University College London (DPU) and the Humanitarian Affairs Team of Save the Children UK (HAT).

Religion and the Promotion of Social Justice for Refugees (2018-2020)

Funded by the British Council-USA and the Henry Luce Foundation, this interdisciplinary project brought together leading experts from the UK and the US to examine the roles that religion plays in promoting social justice for refugees. Through comparative research with and about refugees from and in Central America, Central Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Western borderlands, the project aimed to analyse the roles that local faith communities and faith based organisations (FBOs) play: in supporting refugees’ access to protection; lobbying for rights; and challenging xenophobia and discrimination against different groups of refugees.
This project was led by Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (UCL-Geography), Dr. Zareena Grewal (Yale University) and Dr Unni Krishnan Karunakara (Yale University), in collaboration with UK-based co-investigaotors Prof. Alastair Ager (Queen Margaret University), Dr. Anna Rowlands (Durham University) and Prof. Lyndsey Stonebridge (UEA). and US-based Prof. Catherine Panter-Brick (Yale University) and Dr. Louisa Lombard (Yale University).

Temporary migrants or new European citizens? Geographies of integration and response between ‘camps’ and the city.

Funded by the British Academy UK International Challenges award, this project was to provide an alternative account of the European ‘refugee crisis’, where the arrival of over 1.5 million refugees since 2015 has stretched EU and individual state capacities; tested formal registration and arrival procedures; and (reignited) debates around continental ‘margins’ and geopolitical power differentials between east and west Europe. In this project, we provincialised and challenged narratives of ‘the crisis’ through an engagement with the evolving duties of care, needs and agencies of refugees and providers on the arrival ‘frontlines’. Our multi-sited research engaged with the myriad forms of arrival settlement, from the makeshift and temporary camps along the Hungarian-Serbian border to the sprawling tent communities in Lesbos, and the disintegration of the ‘Jungle’ in Calais. By ‘thinking from the south’ and vantage of post-colonial cities, we captured and explored the improvisation, precarity, makeshift practices and alternative scripts of citizenship that refugees and local agencies utilize alongside how state rules and norms are negotiated.
The project was led by Dr Tatiana Thieme (UCL-Geography) in collaboration with Dr. Eszter Kovacs (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Kavita Ramakrishnan (UEA).
Affiliation: UCL-Department of Geography

Zugunruhe

'Zugunruhe' was a theatre project that explored migration patterns in both humans and the natural world, and examined the cultural/ political construction of a 'refugee'. The project built on Tom Bailey's earlier work with refugees at the Good Chance theatre in the Calais 'Jungle' refugee camp in 2016. During Tom's residency with the Migration Research Unit as Leverhulme Artist in Residence, Tom researched and developed work that explores migration through live performance. Throughout his residence, Tom ran a series of workshops around his research, and presented a developmental performance of 'Zugunruhe' in 2017.
The project was led by Tom Bailey, Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the UCL-Migration Research Unit
Affiliation: Migration Research Unit, UCL-Geography.