UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

When It Burns

The role of poetry and the poet in the climate and biodiversity crisis. Join Tawona Sitholé at Feast Cafe in Kirkcudbright for an evening of live performance and conversation. Tickets here.  

Alison Phipps in conversation with Yahia Labadia, author of What Remains to be Said. An evening organised by the Iona Community. Watch the video here. 

Forced to Flee, The Refugee Abyss

Hyab Yohannes gave a talk at Perth Museum from 6:30-7:30pm as part of UNESCO RIELA's collaboration with their Waters Rising exhibit.

Hyab discussed his as yet unpublished work, The Refugee Abyss, an unflinching exploration of the “un-grievable” and the “unsayable.” In his work, Hyab doesn’t just memorialise lost lives and forgotten histories; he gives voice to those who have been silenced by systems of power and challenges us to rethink the structures that deem certain lives disposable. The Refugee Abyss confronts the harsh realities of forced displacement, raising vital questions: Whose stories are we willing to listen to? Which voices do we ignore? Hyab invited us to reflect on the traces left by those seeking refuge - wounds, scars, and silent histories that shape the global landscape of migration.

Sinking Suburbs and Waters Rising

Alison Phipps gave a talk at Perth Art Gallery from 6:30-7:30pm as part of UNESCO RIELA's collaboration with the Waters Rising exhibit at Perth Museum.

Alison invited us to have an intimate glimpse into the lives of the Ōtepoti, a South Dunedin community where she has spent time over the past five years as a companion and resident. South Dunedin, a low-lying suburb in New Zealand, is home to nearly 3,000 houses and lies 50cm above sea level, with rising waters being the first of many obstacles. We’ll find out how a mix of runoff, seawater erosion, inadequate drainage, and economic hardship threaten the community.  Discover the actions that residents are taking to safeguard their homes and their futures, and learn about the efforts of The Seedling, a grassroots community initiative, whose small but powerful acts of resilience offer hope and a model of collective response to an uncertain future.

Creative Writing Workshop: Waters Rising 

Join artists and educators Jason Oliver and Tawona Sitholé in this creative writing workshop, 10:30am at Perth Museum, as they dive into the narratives inspired by the Waters Rising exhibition. In sharing their own connection to the carved Nyaminyami staff on display, a powerful symbol of protection and the strength of nature, Jason and Tawona will guide you through a range of exercises aimed at igniting creativity, improving writing skills and fostering collaboration. With a focus on the exhibition, this unique workshop will see you consider the ways in which objects and nature can connect people and inspire creativity.

Book your place here! 

Alison Phipps and Tawona Sitholé will be delivering a public lecture on their work with Gaza, entitled: Working with the rubble: the enduring resilience of Palestinian universities in Gaza. This will take place from 1-3pm at the Centre for Global Migrations, University of Otago.

Download the event poster COE seminar 6 March 2025.

Book launch: There She Goes: New Travel Writing by Women. All warmly invited to this anthology of travel writing, edited by Esa Aldegheri. Place: The Portobello Bookshop. Time: 7:00-8:00pm. Get your tickets here.

Poetry from out of the rubble

Dunedin Public Libraries and Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature warmly invite you to join poets Alison Phipps and Tawona Ganyamatopé Sitholé from Glasgow in conversation with Neil Vallelly.

Alison and Tawona will perform work from their first collection The Warriors who do not Fight and their upcoming collection In this Warriors Cry (Wild Goose Publications). Alison will also share from her bestselling collection Keep Telling of Gaza (Sìdhe Press), written with Khawla Badwan.

Please join us afterwards for tea/coffee and cake.

‘Expect an evening of emotion, plenty of laughter and nourishing, resistant, joy in life.’

Who’s Afraid of Decolonisation?

Featuring: Professor Alison Phipps & Tawona Sitholé

Join us for an insightful discussion on ‘Lumpy Crossings: Trauma Sensitivity in Traumatising Times’, where Professor Alison Phipps and Tawona Sitholé will explore their work within the UNESCO Chair at Glasgow University. They will share their experiences in navigating the complexities of race, gender, and class while designing and delivering research projects focused on refugees and migration in an increasingly challenging global landscape.

Time: 6:00 PM
Location: St Michael’s Kelburn
Entry: By Koha (donation) 

Affiliate Artist Anton Floyd was part of Come Together for Gaza, see flyer below.

Alison Phipps will present at the Conference on Rebuilding Higher Education in Gaza, held in Qatar.

Book talk at Gavin's Mill in Milngavie, Scotland

Professor Alison Phipps and Khawla Badwan, the authors of ‘Keep Telling of Gaza’ a call-and-response book of poems, will read from their book, as well as talk of their experience working with colleagues in Gaza.

The Refugee Abyss: a talk by Hyab Yohannes, which draws on refugeesʼ displaced voices to foreground embodied knowledge through their lived, felt and witnessed experiences. This will be in the ARC (11 Chapel Lane, Glasgow) on 28 April, 17:30-19:00. Tickets are free and can be booked here.

Creatives of Colour Festival 2025!

Three days OF celebrating the creative contributions of people of colour, hosted by Civic House, Glad Cafe, and Glasgow Film Theatre! Iman Tajik, UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist, will show his film A to B.

Our PhD students Hope Wang and Samira Hassanzade will present at the School of Social and Environmental Sustainability's 1-day hybrid PGR Conferencehttps. Join them in person or online via Zoom.

The full UNESCO RIELA team will be at St Andrew's University for the Global Learnings from the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy event.

Free performance of Oud Player on the Tel at Cottiers Theatre in Glasgow, 7:30pm. Free tickest: https://OudPlayerOnTheTel.eventbrite.co.uk 

This piece, written by Tom Block from the International Human Rights Arts Movement and directed by Jesica Garrou, aims to tell the story of how the founding of Israel on Palestinian land could have been a catalyst for peace, and instead became 75+ years of conflict into the war of today. Although very sensitive to the Palestinian narrative, it also shows how the Jewish people were "hanging by a thread" at that time, and points out that the British and, to a lesser extent America, played a role in beginning this ongoing conflict. The piece aims to educate, as well as open new doorways of understanding in a situation desperately in need of it.

Part of the Fringe activities around the 

UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating

We are excited to announce that the theme for next year's in-person Spring School is "May peace prevail". This Spring School will focus on peacebuilding, specifically using arts, languages and education.

For 2025, we invite proposals which explore 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. The deadline for proposals is midnight on Tuesday 28 January 2025. 

27th Wole Soyinka Lecture, in collaboration with the Centre for Forced Migration - Trinity College Dublin

The theme of this year’s lecture, *"Building Resilient, Cohesive Communities and the Challenges of Global Migration: The Irish Experience"*, is in consonance with the United Nations _“Call to Action”_ on displaced persons, a humanitarian crisis that is impacting nations and affecting lives around the world.

Join us as we facilitate this critical discourse on the challenges facing the “global majority” and the re-emergence of Western Nationalism. In line with the foremost objective of the Wole Soyinka Lecture Series to promote good governance, social justice and the advancement of democratic ideals, the 27th Wole Soyinka Lecture is positioned to seek solutions that are pertinent, exigent and paramount to resolving this global human conflict. UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist Anton Floyd is part of the programme.

Click on this link to reserve your spot today on Eventbrite.

Exploring the Public Role of the University: An Interdisciplinary Symposium 

Alison Phipps will be a contributing to this event, which is questioning the public role of the university and its potential positive contribution, a pertinent question in the current juncture marked by important strains in the UK (and international) higher education system. Such strains are manifest externally in the querying of the relevance and legitimacy of science; and internally, through issues as wide-ranging as financial viability and the spaces for contention. More information and registration. 

Coffee & Stories: Eritrean Coffee Ceremony

We will be hosting an event as part of Refugee Festival Scotland and Glasgow Science Festival. You are all warmly invited to come to the Clarice Pears building, 90 Byres Road, Glasgow, G12 8TB, between 11:00am and 3:00pm for our Eritrean Coffee Ceremony, to share stories and freshly brewed Eritrean coffee. We will explore the coffee ceremony as a place of peace, of support and community, as a way to connect to one another and to learn from each other's cultural practices. Bring the family, the dog and your friends! All welcome, no need to register, just turn up!

As part of Refugee Festival Scotland, Tawona Sitholé and Dilara Özel will be hosting a family-friendly workshop entitled Ties That Bind: Discovering Family Stories Through Conversation and Art. They invite children age 8-11 and their families to explore identity and connection through conversation and creativity. 

Public talk by visiting academic Jordana Silverstein – ‘You didn’t know where you were going’: Testifying to the Experiences and Emotions of Statelessness.

Date and time: Fri 20 June, 3–4.30pm

Venue: New Adam Smith Building, room 414A, University of Glasgow (Gilmorehill campus) – for directions click here; nearest subway is Kelvinhall. 

Abstract: In this paper I draw on the words offered – in oral history interviews I’ve conducted in recent years – of people who have been stateless and who migrated to Australia. Listening carefully to them, I think through the ways in which people remember their experiences of statelessness, their migration journeys, and their life in Australia. Drawing on the conception of “stateless memory” offered by Marianne Hirsch, I seek to bring to the surface the complicated narratives that people who have been stateless articulate, working to understand the bonds between people and place - that exceed the categories offered by the nation-state - that some of those who have been stateless create in and through their memories of their statelessness.

Bio: Dr Jordana Silverstein is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow based in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne, and a Visiting Affiliate at the Menzies Australia Institute, Kings College London. A cultural historian, she’s the award-winning author of Cruel Care: A History of Children At Our Borders (2023).

Ahead of her talk, Dr Silverstein will also be offering a postgraduate masterclass on oral history approaches to stateless and refugee histories (1–2.30pm in a nearby venue). For more details please contact Benjamin Thomas White: benjaminthomas.white@glasgow.ac.uk

Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum

Esa Aldegheri will be a keynote speaker at this interdisciplinary symposium asking how creative practices have been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century. Taking place at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Displaced Arts will explore the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which have been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex.

The call for papers is available here and is open until Wednesday 15 January 2025.

In commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, the Remembering Srebrenica Scottish Board of Ambassadors, together with the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Language, and Arts, is organising a remembrance event at the University Chapel.

Together we will remember the victims of the genocide and listen to the following speakers:

Professor Alison Phipps, holder of the UNESCO Chair
Dr Waqar Azmi OBE, Chairman and Founder of Remembering Srebrenica
John Corrigan QPM, former chief of police and counter-terrorism leader
Keynote: Prof. Najla Hrustanovic, PhD, LMCH, Director of Multicultural and Social Justice Curriculum at Antioch University, Seattle
Alison Anderson, MBE, Former NHS Mortuary Services Manager and Emergency Preparedness Lead
Almira Delibegovic-Broom, KC, Chair of Justice Scotland, Honorary Consul for Scotland of Bosnia-Herzegovina
Robert McNeil, chair of Remembering Srebrenica Scotland

Sheena Wellington will sing Karine Polwart's song Whar Dae Ye Lie and we will also be screening a genocide denial video, produced by Sue Jimenez. The event will end with a short candle-lighting ceremony.