Wednesday 17 December 2008

6th Annual Forced Migration Student Conference Call for Papers Call for Papers. "Refugees: Lives Pushed to the Margins?"

The 6th Annual Forced Migration Student Conference organised by postgraduates and hosted by the Refugee Research Centre at the University of East London on Saturday the 25th and Sunday the 26th of April.

Living a life in the margins or a marginalised life is a recurrent trope in the field of forced migration studies. Throughout the whole refugee experience from persecution and flight to settlement and integration, refugees find themselves pushed to the margins and often excluded. The marginalisation of various categories of forced migrants brings into question the effectiveness of protection regimes. Livelihood strategies of forced migrants are formulated at the very margins of society, some of whom are compelled to do so 'outside' the law. How do refugees negotiate identities that help them to combat social exclusion? Adopting a reflexive gaze, as researchers and aspiring academics we must ask ourselves how considerable and pertinent are the dialogues of practitioners and academics? Is academia to be confined to the sidelines or can it be more engaged with forced migrants? In which ways can the study of forced migration be related to wider global issues?

The conference invites papers that fit within the broad theme of the conference and forced migration more generally. We solicit papers that converge on the following sub-themes of the conference:

1) Conversations and interdisciplinary dialogues (scholarly, policy, practitioners, NGOs)

2) Sites of liminality and change (state; regional; local, trans-national; familial; individual)

3) Conversations in issue-areas (development; human rights; migration; security; post-conflict)

4) Sites of experience (gender; flight; re-settlement; camps; exclusion)

Postgraduate students (Masters/MPhil/PhD) are invited to submit abstracts for papers (no more than 250 words) and a personal profile (no more than 100 words). They should be sent, with full contact details, by 4pm on 26th January 2009 to: fmconference2009@googlemail.com


Posted in: Refugee Studies and Conferences & Events.

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