In this third edition of the UNESCO RILA Sofa Cafés, Professor Alison Phipps , holder of the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts (RILA) at the University of Glasgow, will enter into conversation with Melanie Baak (University of South Australia), Rachel Burke (University of Newcastle, Australia), Sara Kindon (Victoria University Wellington), Sally Baker (University of New South Wales), Veronica Crosbie (University of Sanctuary Ireland), Gün Orgun (City of Sanctuary) and Rachel Sandison (University of Glasgow) to discuss access to education for students from refugee background.

This UNESCO RILA Sofa Cafés are a series of discussions around topics that touch on integration through languages and the arts. These informal discussions will be held on Zoom: the link will be in the confirmation email. Audience members are being encouraged to join in and ask their own questions to the panellists.

The Sofa Cafés are held on a monthly basis. The next scheduled episodes are on:

Thursday 21 January 2021 - Hospitality in community

Wednesday 24 February 2021 - Health and Hospitality

Tuesday 23 March 2021 - Migration and Arts: A closer look at the MiDEQ Project

Thursday 22 April 2021 - Arts and Integration: examples from around the world

Biographies of the speakers:

Melanie Baak

Dr Melanie Baak is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in UniSA Education Futures (University of South Australia). Her research and teaching are underpinned by understandings of how systems and structures work to marginalise sections of the population, particularly culturally and linguistically diverse groups. In recent research projects she has collaborated with refugee background communities to explore areas including; belonging, education and employment. She is currently a chief investigator on an ARC Linkage project exploring how schools foster refugee student resilience. Her book ‘Negotiating Belongings: stories of forced migration of Dinka women from South Sudan’ (Sense, 2016) considers how forced migration shapes experiences of belonging. She is passionate about education and has taught in schools in Australia, Kenya and South Sudan and currently runs two schools in South Sudan through her charity, Timpir.

Gün Orgun

Gün Orgun is the Scotland Coordinator for City of Sanctuary, a refugee sector charity which supports a UK-wide network of grass-roots groups with the aim of promoting a culture of active welcome for refugees and people seeking asylum in communities and in organisations. Since her appointment in January 2019, she has been focusing particularly on the Universities of Sanctuary initiative, and enjoying working with colleagues in the higher education sector in Scotland, with the objective of making Scottish Universities more actively welcoming of refugees and people seeking asylum

Rachel Burke

Dr Rachel Burke is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Rachel’s research, teaching, and advocacy focus on linguistically and culturally diverse contexts, with emphasis on strengths-based approaches to higher education for learners from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, including people with refugee and asylum seeker experiences. Rachel is privileged to partner with a range of communities in exploring possibilities for educational practices that honour diverse linguistic repertoires. These collaborations focus on promoting praxis-driven, inclusive, reciprocal, and culturally respectful language and literacies learning for all people.

Sara Kindon

Sara is a Professor of Human Geography and Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (VUW). A concern for equity informs her teaching, research and community engagement, and she is best known for her work on democratising methodologies particularly through participatory action research (PAR) and participatory video. Since 2005, she has used PAR with refugee background communities – particularly young people – and postgraduate students to explore key issues in resettlement including; access to and success within education, health and wellbeing, employment, sports, gender and belonging. She is also the Coordinator of the VUW Network to Support Refugee Background Students, which was established out of recommendations from the first PAR project carried out at VUW in 2006. Through this role, and the research supporting it, she and colleagues have changed University equity policy to include refugee background students, created targeted scholarships and most recently, established a Refugee Background Students Advisor position. Since 2019, she is also leading the establishment of a national tertiary education network to support refugee background Students. She loves working cross-culturally and multi-lingually and prior to taking up her professional position at VUW, lived and worked in the UK, Spain, Costa Rica, Canada, and Indonesia.

Rachel Sandison

Rachel Sandison is Vice Principal, External Relations at the University of Glasgow. As a member of the University’s senior management team, Rachel's responsibilities include strategic leadership for domestic and international student recruitment; marketing, brand and reputation; undergraduate and postgraduate admissions; international affairs and partnership development; fundraising & alumni relations; and widening participation. She is also the University’s Refugee & Asylum Seeker Champion.

Rachel is a chartered marketer and a CASE Global Trustee. She is a member of the Universities Scotland International Committee and sits on a number of sector advisory boards. She is also the University of Glasgow’s senior leader for the Universitas 21 network and The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities.

Rachel has almost 20 years experience of working in higher education, and prior to her role at the University of Glasgow, was Director of External Relations at the University of Aberdeen.

Sally Baker

Dr Sally Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and the education ‘focal point’ for the Forced Migration Research Network at The University of New South Wales. Sally’s teaching and research interests centre on language, literacies, transition and equity in higher education, particularly with regard to culturally and linguistically diverse students, and refugee students in particular. Sally is the Chair of the national Refugee Education Special Interest Group for/with students from refugee backgrounds, supported by the Refugee Council of Australia. Sally’s recent book (with Professor Jacqueline Stevenson), Refugees in Higher Education: Debate, Discourse, Practice has been shortlisted for a 2019 American Publishers’ Association PROSE Award.

Veronica Crosbie

Dr Veronica Crosbie is an Assistant Professor in Migration and Intercultural Studies in SALIS, Dublin City University (DCU) and Chair of the University of Sanctuary Ireland (UoSI) network. She is the former Chair of the MA in Refugee Integration (MARI) and was instrumental in establishing DCU as the first University of Sanctuary in Ireland in 2016, which entails creating a culture of welcome for asylum seekers and refugees, and she has also more recently co-facilitated the establishment of NOMADS (Network of Migration and Diversity Studies) in DCU. In 2017, she co-hosted the colloquium Asylum Narratives with Dr Agnès Maillot and they co-edited a special issue related to the theme for the journal Studies in Arts and Humanities, Vol 4, 2, which was published in January 2019.

Her doctoral research focused on the development of capabilities for critical cosmopolitan citizenship in higher education. She has published on this theme in international peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections, as well as giving keynote lectures on the subject in South Africa, the UK and Spain. Over the course of the past three years, she has conducted participatory action research on integration through the arts with social enterprise BlueFire. More recently, her focus has turned to applying capability approach theory to asylum and refugee contexts, most notably concerning Direct Provision in Ireland, again using participatory action research methodology. She is also currently investigating the university of sanctuary model as a framework for supporting and developing socially just institutes of higher education. She is director of the Mellie project, one of DCU’s flagship sanctuary activities.

Alison Phipps

Alison Phipps holds the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow where she is also Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, and one of the founding members of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET). She is Co-Chair of the AHRC GCRF Advisory board and recipient of a number of GCRF grants as both PI and Co I working in Zimbabwe, Gaza, Ghana, Uganda and with refugees in the UK. Most recently she was appointed Co-Director and Co-I for the £20 million UKRI GCRF South South Migration Inequality and Development Hub.

Alison chairs the New Scots Core Group for Refugee Integration in partnership with Scottish Government, COSLA and Scottish Refugee Council; She Co-Chairs AHRC GCRF Advisory Board and she is an Ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council.

She is author of numerous academic books and articles and a regular international keynote speaker and broadcaster, including most recently, Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate, with Multilingual Matters. Her first collection of poetry, Through Wood was published in 2009, with a further collection - The Warriors who do not Fight was published in 2018, with co-author Tawona Sitholé.

In 2018 she was awarded the De Carle Visiting Professorship at Otago University, 2017 she was appointed Adjunct Professor of Hospitality and Tourism at Auckland University of Technology. In 2016 she was appointed ‘Thinker in Residence’ at the EU Hawke Centre at University of South Australia. She was the Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2013, and is Adjunct Professor of Tourism. In 2011 she was voted ‘Best College Teacher’ by the student body and received the Universities ‘Teaching Excellence Award’ for a Career Distinguished by Excellence. In 2012 she received an OBE for Services to Education and Intercultural and Interreligious Relations in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2019 she was awarded the Minerva medal by the Royal Society of Philosophy. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.