Education system strengthening in Bangladesh, Iraq and Lebanon
UCL Institute of Education is launching a seminar series, chaired by Professor Tejendra Pherali, which will showcase emerging research from focal countries of the Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC) programme— including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Myanmar — and engage in critical and inclusive dialogue with the wider community of researchers, graduate students, and policy makers and practitioners in educational work in conflict and crisis settings.
PRESENTATIONS
Dr Justine Howard
UNICEF reports that children represent 50% of refugee populations. The impact of this displacement on children is significant, affecting their mental health and development across domains. Only around 3% of humanitarian aid funding is allocated to education and with such a sizeable population of children affected by conflict and protracted crisis, sustainable interventions are needed to support them at this most challenging time. Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh hosts the world’s largest refugee camp with a population of over 1 million Rohingya people, who have fled persecution and violence in Myanmar. More than half of this displaced population are school-aged children. Our British Academy Bilateral Chair programme has developed research collaborations between Swansea University (UK) and the BRAC University (Bangladesh). Among many objectives, the Bilateral Chair research programme aims to design and deliver play and learning interventions in educational and community contexts in both camp and host community settings in Cox’s Bazar. These interventions are designed to provide cost effective and sustainable support for children’s mental health and development and crucially, are designed to be culturally relevant for optimum engagement and impact. This presentation will describe the projects being undertaken as part of the Bilateral Chair award. The presentation will demonstrate how our work contributes to the development of approaches to education systems in the context of Cox's Bazar via its emphasis on the unique needs of the children affected by displacement in this local context, the importance of a co-constructed community approach to intervention design and the centrality of cultural relevance.
Professor Maha Shuayb
The landscape of knowledge production within the forced migration domain bears historical imprints of colonial legacies (Malkki 1996; Donini 2010; Palladino and Woolley 2018). Recent inquiry into the burgeoning field of refugee education reveals a pronounced schism between the global north and south, reminiscent of colonizer-colonized dynamics (Kassis, 2022). Despite a few exceptions (Dryden-Peterson 2022, Hammoud et al. 2022, Ramsey and Baker 2019), research endeavours have often been segregated across these global hemispheres, without fostering cross-dialogue. Employing a political economy framework, the paper analyses facets such as power dynamics, economic interests, ideological influences, access to knowledge, and global imbalances that perpetuate the North-South divide in forced migration research and specifically focusing on research on education for refugees. Leveraging UCL explore, Scopus and the Shamaa bibliographic databases, our analysis examines articles published on education for refugees in the past twenty years, encompassing 829 peer-reviewed contributions, 741 in English and 88 in Arabic language. Articles are categorized based on our delineated criteria and facets for the political economy. Initial findings underscore a prevailing pattern wherein studies are chiefly authored by scholars from the global north, although conducted research predominantly unfolds in the global south, scant in co-citations with Southern scholars—mimicking an extractive knowledge production model. Access to knowledge compound the problem, with many studies eluding the reach of global south scholars. A concentration on micro and meso-levels is evident, while macro-level inquiries are limited. This is accompanied by a general lack of theoretical exploration within the field. Evidently, the colonial legacies of forced migration studies reverberate through the very knowledge they generate, perpetuating a cycle of inequitable representation and production dynamics. In conclusion, the paper discusses what consequences the insights from our analysis and a political economy approach might have for current calls for decolonising refugee education research.
Professor Kelsey Shanks
Education, Peace and Politics (EEP) is a BA funded Bilateral Chair partnership between Ulster University in the UK and Koya University in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), with inclusion of the University of Mosul in federal Iraq as a third symbolic partner. Education in conflict-affected contexts is complex and often highly politicized, with a range of internal power dynamics impacting resource allocation, educational planning and delivery. Rather than acting as a vehicle for peacebuilding and human rights agendas, education is often manipulated by both state and non-state groups for political motives. EPP aims to strengthen critically informed analysis of education in Iraq and support local researchers to explore education’s role in building sustainable peace. The objective of the project is to help generate knowledge that can inform socially just education systems and provision for children and young people. EPP facilitates individual, institutional and environmental capacity exchange in support of education research in Iraq and the KRI. The project provides tools, resources and mentoring support to over 20 education researchers from across Iraq and hosts a network of PhD students from across the Middle East. EPP hope to challenge the northern domination of knowledge production in conflict affected contexts by supporting a new generation of scholars and practitioners to undertake political economy analysis of education systems.