An introduction to refugee and forced migration studies

Nicholas is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His current work looks at urban displacement and mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa. His PhD research focused on southern Africa, looking at the relationship between refugee camps/settlements and urban displacement of refugees.

He is also the Academic Support Officer for this MA programme at the University of London. In addition, he is the module convener of this core module RPM020 and supervises MA dissertations at the University of London and University of the Witwatersrand. Nicholas has nearly two years’ experience working in the field as an advocate for organisations such as Asylum Access, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and UNHCR.

Christina is a Visiting Research Fellow at the RLI and Lecturer in International Relations at Loughborough University. Prior to this she was in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, and was awarded her DPhil. Her doctoral work is an interdisciplinary study in Geography and International Relations entitled ‘Migration management: the radical violence of the international politics of migration’. In this work, questions are asked about the construction of the ‘illegal migrant’ as a particular political subject, framed in the context of changes in the doctrine formation of international migration since the 1980s. ‘Migration management’ raises important questions about normative violence, governance and ethics.

Christina has a multidisciplinary background, with degrees in Social Policy, Politics and Law; Intercultural Work, Human Rights and Conflict Management; and Research Methods awarded by universities in both Germany and the UK. She has worked for several years in organisations including the UNHCR Branch Office in Berlin and an international NGO in Geneva.

Lucy has spent 18 years working with local and international civil society on issues of forced displacement and conflict across Sub-Saharan Africa. Areas of experience include forced migration, conflict analysis and conflict sensitivity, access to justice, transitional justice, gender-based violence and qualitative research design. She has extensive work experience with a broad range of governments, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions and donors in order to understand conflict contexts, their impact on local populations and how best policy interventions can improve their effectiveness.

Lucy is currently the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Transitional Justice, a Deployable Civilian Expert for the UK Government’s Stabilisation Unit, and a Senior Research Associate for the International Refugee Rights Initiative. Her book, Refugees, conflict and the search for belonging was published by Palgrave in 2016.

Cory is an anthropologist whose research addresses development-oriented policies targeting mobile and displaced populations in eastern Africa. Focusing on north-western Kenya since 2015, he has conducted long-term fieldwork with Turkana pastoralists as well as refugees and asylum seekers living in the decades-old Kakuma camps.

He is currently researching the emergence of the Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, which is being implemented as one of Kenya’s pledges under the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework. His doctoral project at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology was an ethnographic study of the development encounter in Turkana, focusing on deepening stratification between a pastoralist majority and a growing urban class.

Zoë is a researcher at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University. She works on forced migration and humanitarian response, primarily in protracted urban contexts. She completed a PhD looking at humanitarianism and household-level refugee hosting relationships in Jordan, focusing on the experiences of young Sudanese men. Her current work looks at young people’s trajectories between education and employment in the context of protracted displacement in Jordan and Lebanon.

She teaches on the core module ‘An Introduction to Refugee and Forced Migration Studies’) on this programme at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and on the MA Humanitarian Practice and Peacebuilding and the MA Development and Emergency Practice programmes at CENDEP. She has several years’ experience working in humanitarian response in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti and Jordan.