Online UNESCO RIELA Spring School:The Arts of Integrating 2025

The UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating is an event organised by the UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Languages, and Arts (in short UNESCO RIELA) at the University of Glasgow. The event is bi-annual, with an in person edition during the Northern Hemisphere Spring in May in Glasgow, Scotland, and an online edition during the Southern Hemisphere Spring in October.

Every year there is a specific focus and this year the theme is 'May Peace Prevail'. We will be looking at peacebuilding, specifically using arts, languages and education. We have curated a programme which explores how to build peace in the minds of people, how to live together peacefully, restoratively and interculturally, how to respond to and counteract current events worldwide that seek to divide societies, and how to ensure that peace prevails, founded on justice.

In so doing we acknowledge that to even contemplate peace when colleagues and friends in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially in Gaza, Sudan, Tigray, Ukraine and Lebanon (full list of armed conflicts available here) are experiencing genocide and war crimes of the most horrifying nature is, in itself, a luxury. We are seeing many of the international agreements and conventions which bind our work in the UNESCO Chair, at the University of Glasgow, in shreds and our own critical discussions mean that we have lost much faith, even the little we may have had, in peace-building initiatives. We see our work at present as requiring a degree of resignation from the violent structures which have now comprehensively failed. To work alongside those who should have been offered international refugee protection such that their lives and the conditions for their dignity and life might have been restored is now very much our urgent task. But how to do this when we are grieving tangible and intangible losses on so many levels? What sustains the work of peacebuilding and conflict transformation when language fails, when art is mourning, when grief is raw and critical capacities struggle to make any sense of the world?

And yet – this is our task as people of intellect. And study. And Art. And education. So, what might we say when words fail, when resignation is a necessary task, when forms which held hope no longer exist or are themselves destituted of all power?

Sub-topics we will explore:

• Non-violent strategies to prevent hatred, wars, and violent conflicts, we are especially interested in strategies that include languages and/or arts.
• Examples by community groups/organisations where peacebuilding is part of the integration methodology: what are the difficulties and best practices?
• Researching “peacebuilding”, how to deal with research-related issues (access to conflict areas, cultural representation, story extraction etc.).
• Educating the next generation of peacebuilders: bearing witness and passing on knowledge, approaches to integrate peacebuilding and conflict resolution into school curricula.
• When peace is not your daily reality, what can be done? Methods for using art to preserve the socio-cultural memory of people affected by conflict and to support mental health.
• Strategies for creating spaces for reconciliation and dialogue, creative art approaches to facilitate healing in post-conflict societies.
• Critical perspectives on liberal peacebuilding, on securitisation and theoretical models, routed in praxis, for enabling peace to prevail, perspectives from people with lived experience of conflict and persecution.

Full list of contributions per day:

Monday 27 October

Keynote speakers: Prof Alison Phipps (UNESCO RIELA) & Dr Bilgin Ayata (Graz University / Elastic Borders project)
Keynote musician: Fergus McNeil

Presenters:

• Dilara Özel, Beril Doğan, Hilal Karaoğlan, Şevval Cihankaya - Singing Peace Together: Co-Creating Multilingual Songs
• Tola Benjamin Kehinde (Redeemer’s University, Ede, Nigeria) - Reimagining Peacebuilding through Decolonial Pedagogy and AI: Lessons from Nigeria
  
• Magda Angélica García von Hoegen - Poetry for Peace
• Miray Filiz - TBC
• Dr Maria Grazia Imperiale, Dr Giovanna Fassetta, Dr Sahar Alshobaki (all University of Glasgow) & Damian Ross (University of Porto) - The LINEs for Palestine project

Tuesday 28 October

Keynote speaker: Luigi Toscano (UNESCO Artist for Peace)
Keynote musician: Martin Kerr

Presenters:

• Diana Agamez, Luisa Machacon & Isabella Corvino - We Care: Bodies as archives of memory. The Reciprocity of Care.
• Dani - Cultivating Digital – Emotional Competencies for Resilience Building amidst Violences in Virtual Space
• Kalika Kastein - When a Country Becomes a Choir: what 30,000 voices can do
• Kathrin Warth & Avril Bellinger - Looking for Loopholes: Using the strengths approach in local government refugee support in Germany
• Adriana Uribe & Dr Anna Fancett (Grampian Regional Equality Council) - Creative Language Practice for Peace Education: Exploring language cafes as centres for peace and inclusion
• Benjamin Carey - Why cookbooks matter

Wednesday 29 October

Keynote speakers: Ramon Ayres (Ephemeral Ensemble) & Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (University of Warwick)
Keynote musician: Brice Catherin

Presenters:

• Khaled Alostath - Teaching Through Trauma: Emergent Curriculum in the Gaza Strip
• Marcus Russell Slater - Transposed into sl-o-w-ing and stilling places of silence
• Xiaofan Xu (Guardians of Bamiyan & Guardians of Gandhara) - The Naan Class: From Healing to Hope through Heritage and Art
• Blessing Oluchukwu Awamba - The learned ability to coexist peacefully
• Marzanna Antoniak - "Where Words Lay Down Arms" poetry in discussion

Thursday 30 October

Keynote presenter: Naomi Head (University of Glasgow)
Keynote musician: Magda Angélica García von Hoegen

Presenters:

• Renu Sikka (UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist) - Our Stories on a Plate
• Laavanya Varadarajan Shanmugapriya, Alice Melbourne, Qinzi Zhang, Simran Darak, Natasha Byers-Smith & Emma Girardet (Art Bridges) - Art Bridge Glasgow
• Rezvan Sayyad (Würzburg University, Germany) - Who Gets the Mic? The objectification of Women in Persian Rap and Hip-Hop Culture
• Geraldine Sinyuy (UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist) - An Appeasement Model
• Claire Chalmers & Mark Langdon (Educators for Peace) - Visioning Education for Peace – 2075
• Sophie Spickenbom (University of Glasgow) - Playing Peace: Exploring Relational approaches to Peacebuilding Through Music in Rwanda

Friday 31 October

Keynote presenters: Shira Klein (Academics for Peace) & Matt Rabagliati (UNESCO UK)
Keynote musician: Bozhena Yakymenko

Presenters:

• Brice Catherin & Afulodidim Nikefolosi - Decolonial Love?
• Anna Burgin (Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago) - Everyday peacebuilding in refugee resettlement: supporting a more peaceful Aotearoa New Zealand
• Ayşegül Yurtsever - Teaching for Peace and Language through a Multilayered Approach in EFL Classroom
• Anne Storch (University of Cologne, Germany) - A woman's garden
• Ruchi Saini - Art-based research and gender-based violence: Voices from India

We will also be hosting an OPEN STAGE on Friday, for participants to share their work, reflections or creations.