Resisting hostility: the strive to becoming a sanctuary university

Quality higher education (HE) is not easily accessible by the forcibly displaced. The numbers are alarming: in 2023, the number of displaced people worldwide had risen to 108 million - the highest ever recorded. For tens of millions of people, their education journeys are disrupted and only 6% of refugees participate in HE (UNHCR, 2021). Universities can be agents for change in this humanitarian crisis – from providing scholarships and opportunities to access and participate in HE for students from a refugee background to advocating for refugee’s human rights. In this seminar, Dr Koula Charitonos will talk about the role of universities in responding to this humanitarian crisis by drawing on the notion of the ‘good university’ (Connell, 2019). She will provide empirical evidence from a study conducted at the Open University with a group of students from refugee backgrounds to reflect on insights generated in navigating studies, relations, institutional systems, policies and practices and importantly, to highlight the university’s journey to becoming a sanctuary university.

About the speaker: https://iet.open.ac.uk/people/koula.charitonos

Online Lecture Series for 2023-24: Resisting the Hostile Environment

The Language, Literature and Politics Research Group will host 10 one-hour online talks on ‘Resisting the Hostile Environment’. The context for this lecture series was created in May 2012, when Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May, declared in an interview: ‘The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration .... What we don’t want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they're able to access everything they need’. From different disciplinary perspectives, the speakers in this series address how the state’s efforts to foster a hostile environment for asylum-seekers and refugees in Britain has been enforced, managed, negotiated, and resisted.

Find out more about the Language, Literature and Politics Research Group here: https://fass.open.ac.uk/research/groups/llp