Refugee Week
Refugee Week in Britain is marked by schools, colleges, universities, community groups, charities, museums, galleries, public libraries, and hospitals coming together to organise activities and events in June around World Refugee Day.
I remember, 26 years ago as if it were yesterday: a young student volunteer just discovering the refugee charity sector, excitedly travelling up to the Refugee Council’s office in London to help update and advertise the very first Refugee Week programme of events in an age when social media had not yet been invented and email was for many still something of a novelty. Some of the early colourful, joyous Refugee Week events celebrated multiculturalism and diversity and shared connection with each other through the sharing and celebrating of diverse cultural music and dance and stories and foods.
Over time, Refugee Week has grown into a well-established solidarity movement marked by diverse local and national community and public facing indoor and outdoor events that aim to promote tolerance respect and better understanding of the issues around seeking refuge from persecution. Groups organise plays, talks, discussions, conferences, art installations, puppetry and competitions to promote learning, discussion and empathy and to challenge negative stereotyping of people who seek sanctuary.
It creates openings for people to reflect on current social policies and practices. It advances the idea that those labelled “asylum seekers” and “refugees” are not “statistics” and “problems”, “villains” or “heroes”, but are rather diverse individuals facing adversity in diverse ways and people with whom we each share common humanity.
Refugee Week can offer a useful focus for people to shine a spotlight on refugee issues for the wider public, drawing the attention of those who may not otherwise be engaged in thinking about the social issues around seeking sanctuary.
Refugee Week may focus our collective energies, acting as a catalyst for people to come together to share understanding, think about complex issues and reflect on social justice actions that might be taken individually and collectively to promote understanding and social inclusion.
In an environment that can sometimes feel increasingly hostile towards refugees, events can be used to nurture different ways of thinking to counter hostility. Over the years, events have sought to challenge public and media narratives about refugees, for example through producing news articles or airing films that counter these narratives.
Refugee Week may promote the positive contributions that refugees are making to society, but fundamentally advances the principle that seeking safety from persecution is a human right for all, not simply for those who are considered able to offer the skillsets that our society values. It is not about Britain patting itself on the back for offering sanctuary to people. In Refugee Week, remembering too that here in Britain people may find themselves living in challenging conditions in terms of accommodation, or be held in difficult conditions in UK detention centres or be held in limbo for years whilst their case is processed, people agitate for social change and for fair, humane and dignified treatment for people seeking asylum.
Our Home
This year’s Refugee Week theme has been “Our Home”. Our Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees (CTAR) held a hybrid online and in person event at the Tavistock Centre. Community leaders, social justice activists, people with lived experience of seeking sanctuary, human rights advocates, researchers, academics, social workers, therapists, foster carers of young unaccompanied asylum seekers, film makers, journalists and interested members of the public joined in from countries from around the globe including England, France, Ghana, Greece, India, Iran, Malta, Scotland, Switzerland, and the USA.
This year we were delighted to welcome Refugee Care alumni Louise Baumberg, Angelina Jalonen and Dr Margaret Konima Sesay into our gathering and grateful to have current MA Refugee Care and PPS PhD students Christos Dimitriadis, Sheilagh Guthrie, Mona Jamshidi Nasab, Maryam Kanwer, Ayesha Khan, Stanzin Otsal, Somidha Ray, Ekta Srivastava, Meera Vohora, Nataliia Zadesenets, Sheida Zokaeieh presenting, facilitating, chairing and assisting behind the scenes.
Director of CTAR, Renos Papadopoulos, helped set everyone thinking about the complexities of the concept of “home” and we welcomed speakers from abroad, including Lotus Flower activist Taban Shoresh OBE who spoke of “home comforts” and the challenges of living in long-term forced displacement and Devora Neumark and Stephanie Acker who spoke about “Home beautification and hope: stories from Palestinian refugees in the West Bank”. We were able to show a short video in Arabic with English subtitles pre-recorded in the West Bank for us by videographer Nizar Alayasa.
We were introduced to the recent work in wartime of Ukranian artist Irina Potapenko by Nataliia Zadesenets and those of us in the room made use of crayons and pencils to respond creatively to Irina’s story. Colleagues from the Tavistock, Zoe Given-Wilson and Mishka Mahdi, spoke about supporting unaccompanied asylum-seeking children whilst Nsimire Bisimwa and Ayesha Khan shared thoughts on a clinical case study.
To facilitate inclusion of as many voices as possible, we held small group parallel themed discussions, considering what feeling "at home" means and what may help people seeking sanctuary to feel at home. We are grateful to Wezenet Haile, Tsega Solomon and Jeeda Alhakim and all student volunteers for facilitating these discussions.
The Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies (PPS) has been marking Refugee Week since the beginning of our MA Refugee Care programme, working in partnership with Tavistock, the Refugee Council, UNHCR The UN Refugee Agency, and a range of refugee organisations.
This is the seventh year now that I have been involved in coordinating CTAR events of Refugee Week. Each year our events have been very different but for me the gathering has come to feel like a “home” itself. However hectic the year may be, this week offers a chance to pause and reflect on where we have come since the past year and where we feel we need to aim for next. We can find ourselves preparing for the event as if it were a seasonal festival of pilgrimage.
Whilst difficult issues are tackled, the space we collectively hold open feels a safe and welcoming place of return, a space for reconnection with old friends, colleagues, and allies in the field, and for encounter and connection with new people and new ideas too. Stories and experiences people share can be painful to hear, but collectively we can pay witness to these. It also offers us the chance to strengthen our resolve to do what we can towards effecting social change and build our resilience for the coming year.
The impact
There can be much hope and joy and inspiration in coming together and sharing experience. In anonymous feedback collected from attendees again and again people write of feeling “stimulated”, “inspired”, “recharged”, “energised”.
It is this comment made by a young person with current lived experience of seeking refuge reflecting on what they feel they have learned through attending our event that has really struck me: “As a refugee I see this this country some persons they care about us”.
Those of us working in the field of Refugee Care often take for granted the existence of our peers and the solidarity movement advocating for social justice and respect and fair and humane treatment for people seeking sanctuary. I recall my own wonderment 26 years ago at discovering through Refugee Council volunteering a movement of individuals and organisations working in support of refugees.
Why would a young person new to Britain and today encountering prevalent hostile narratives about refugees be aware that there are a great many people who care about people seeking asylum and who are willing to come together to think about these issues, challenge unfairness in existing systems and seek to bring about change?
If our conference has made people aware that they are not alone, that there are many people working together on refugee care issues and willing to walk alongside people in their struggles and together look at bringing about systemic changes, that there is a social justice movement that they can actively participate in as a changemaker too, then it feels that in Refugee Week we are doing something important.
I feel glad to be part of a university that promotes social inclusion, fair treatment, and respect for people in different circumstances and considers seeking safety from persecution a basic human right and to be part of a departmental team of truly wonderful and inspiring colleagues and students. It is good to remember that this is not something to take for granted and become complacent about. We just have to look around the world and back into history to see this is not an automatic given.
Thanks
Special thanks to colleagues, in particular Renos Papadopoulos, Monica Luci, Anne Snowling, Debbie Stewart and Joanne Emmens at Essex and Nsimire Bisimwa at the Tavistock for support with this event and to the Department of PPS for Strategic Research Fund for supporting my application for costs of refreshments, speaker and volunteer travel. Warm thanks too to this year’s cohort of MA Refugee Care students Amy, Ana, Angelos, Ayesha, Dalmar, Hiyab, Energy, Kirsty, Lubna, Maryam, Meera, Natallia, Sheida, Sheilagh, Smit, Somidha and Stanzin for their support and ideas.
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