Workshop report: What does higher education internationalisation have to do with refugee resettlement?
On Monday 30 July 2018 Dr Tiffany Cone from the Asian University of Women gave a workshop to Global Migrations members and community contacts. The workshop comprised three parts: an overview of the Asian University of Women; an assessment of what is being done internationally to assist those of refugee background; and brainstorming recommendations for the tertiary sector.
The International and National Context: What is currently being done?
Institutions are doing good work to assist refugee background students including:
- access to online learning
- free language tuition
- funding and job placement
- full scholarships
- mentoring programmes
- establishing University clubs for refugees
- advising Equity Office of refugees’ needs
- recording refugees as an equity group (though not all self-identity this way because of the way refugee status is framed or they arrive young and do not identify that way)
Nevertheless, research with refugees reveals that they often encounter:
- alienation
- family and community demands
- lack of community support
- peer pressure
- English language difficulties
- financial hardship
- lack of any information about University programmes
In the New Zealand context key concerns include:
- finance
- immigration policies
- distance
- lack of knowledge
- New Zealand’s lesser reputation compared with the UK and North America
- lack of established ethnic communities.
At the same time, the country is attractive for allowing students to work and the possibility of pathways to permanent immigration.
Recommendations for the Tertiary Sector
The workshop concluded by developing some recommendations for the tertiary sector. Among the recommendations were:
- The need for universities to undergo a change in mindset to be less focused on profit-making and return to the core values of tertiary education. This includes the need for Otago University to explore the ways to fund 5-6 refugee background students to develop high-level English language skills for university entry.
- Institutions to learn from each other and develop collaborative strategic frameworks.
- Universities to consider how they might contribute to refugee resettlement by fostering work opportunities in the wider university environment (for example, in catering, gardening etc)
- Recognition of what refugee-background students bring to the tertiary sector.
Download Materials
- Dr Cone’s Powerpoint presentation Cone Workshop Powerpoint (419KB)
- Summary of key international developments to support refugees in the tertiary sector Higher Education and Refugee Resettlement (85KB)
Migrant Elder Care Workshop report
On 13 July 2018, the Centre for Global Migrations and Collaboration of Ageing Research Excellence hosted a joint symposium on migrant elder care. Five speakers traversed topics of care for Chinese elders, community gardening for senior migrants, interpretation issues for migrant elders, spirituality, and migrant care workers in elder care facilities.
Liangni (Sally) Liu
Esther Ngocha-Chaderopa
Following the five presentations, participants moved into groups to brainstorm challenges within the migrant elder care sector. Key findings and recommendations include:
- Government should fix loopholes in the existing immigration legislation rather than close the family reunification category. For instance, migrant elders (grandparents) can visit New Zealand multiple times but only up to 6 months at a time with a maximum stay of 18 months in three years. This regulation fails to recognise the value that migrant elders (grandparents) have in providing long-term support and care to their children and grandchildren;
- For migrant elders in New Zealand, ascertain whether there is a need to establish a group to facilitate migrant elders to better connect with their local communities. If desirable, a key person needs to drive the initiative forward with support from a critical mass;
- Seek to facilitate group mingling between migrant elders of different ethnicities to develop cultural learning, respect and understanding.
- Recognise the need for a sustainable immigration policy to retain migrants, including a special category or better recognition for care workers. Current policy for an Essential Skills Work Visa in ‘lower-skilled employment’ stipulates that after three years in the country, applicants must spend a year outside New Zealand before being granted another visa. Under this category, applicants are also prevented from bringing their families to New Zealand to join them. This is problematic in light of the investment employers make in relation to job training etc.
- Recognise the demands on migrant care workers who often have to: refund a migration agent in their homeland; repay their families for financial support; provide remittances for their kin; and cover their own expenses. The practice of sending remittances back to points of origin could be alleviated if immigration policy permitted family reunification.
- Establish regular/ongoing workshops that support workers in the migrant elder care sector to better understand the impact of cultural perspectives in care homes.
Addressing the Challenges of Migrant Elder Care Workshop
Workshop
‘Addressing the Challenges of Migrant Elder Care’
Friday 13 July 2018, 9.30-4pm
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
This one-day workshop, co-hosted with the Collaboration of Ageing Research Excellence, brings together academics, practitioners and the general public to address the challenges of migrant elder care.
The workshop will comprise formal presentations in the morning with break-out brainstorming sessions in the afternoon.
Our speakers are:
- Fr Michael Hishon (Chaplain of Little Sisters of the Poor rest home and hospital)
- Beryl Lee (Dunedin Multi Ethnic Council)
- Dr Liangni Sally Liu (Massey University)
- Esther Ngocha-Chaderopa (Rotorua Institute of Technology and University of Otago)
- Robyn Pask (Chief Executive, Interpreting New Zealand)
Lunch and morning and afternoon tea will be provided. As numbers are limited, we require advance registration. Further details can be found on our website. Our workshop poster is available here: 2018 migrant elder care poster.
Voices from Asia: Narratives of Migrant and Refugee Women in Higher Education
Free Public Lecture
‘Voices from Asia: Narratives of Migrant and Refugee Women’
Dr Tiffany Cone
Asian University for Women
Thursday 2 August 2018, 12.30-1.30pm
Dunningham Suite, Dunedin Public Library
The Asian University for Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh is currently home to approximately 700 young women from 15 different countries throughout Asia including Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, Vietnam, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and China. AUW was originally established to provide access to higher education for young women from impoverished families and/or war-torn countries throughout the region.
The majority of the students are thus funded on scholarships provided by outside donor organisations. This talk introduces the institute and shares some student narratives from amongst this diverse and unique student body, exploring women’s motivations for studying in Bangladesh and their plans for the future. In so doing, it explores questions of identity formation, belonging, and hope in the face of challenging circumstances.
As well as offering an insight into the development of new ‘knowledge diasporas’, it considers how the women’s narratives challenge current understandings of higher education internationalisation – as a market-driven one-way flow of people from the Global South to the Global North.
Migration, Education and Translation – call for chapters
MIGRATION, EDUCATION AND TRANSLATION:
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Human Mobility and Cultural Encounters
Collection of peer-reviewed essays edited by Vivienne Anderson & Henry Johnson (Centre for Global Migrations, University of Otago)
This multidisciplinary collection of essays will examine the connections between education, migration and translation. The editors welcome chapter proposals on the following topics (other topics will be given due consideration):
- The translation of ideas in educational contexts
- Education and communication beyond language
- Intercultural communication in education
- Untranslatability
- “Otherness” and education
- Colonial and postcolonial perspectives
- Language survival and maintenance
- Minority and endangered languages
- Linguistic loss
- Linguistic imperialism
- Linguistic hospitality
- Bilingual education
- Language teaching and language learning
- Critical perspectives on education
- Power, hegemony, education and language
- Internationalisation and education
- Forced migrations and education
- Educational access
- Multilingual research and writing
- Translanguaging and bi/multilingual learning strategies
- Linguistic translation in education
- Compulsory education and language
- Resilience in education
Timeline:
250-word abstracts by 18 June 2018 to henry.johnson@otago.ac.nz
Please include a short bio of about 150 words.
Proposals will be reviewed by 15 July 2018.
Chapters (6000 words including references and footnotes) submitted by 15 November 2018.
A PDF with further details can be viewed here.migration education cfp book (66KB)
2018 Visiting Lecturer: Dr Tiffany Cone
We are delighted to announce that our Visiting Lecturer for 2018 is Dr Tiffany Cone, an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Dr Cone has experience conducting ethnographic research and producing documentaries in East Asia, South Asia and the Pacific. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Australian National University and a BA (Hons) in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Otago. Her primary research interests lie in the field of psychological anthropology and include cross-cultural conceptions of the self, practices of self-cultivation and meaning-making, processes of rupture and healing and Buddhist, Daoist and Sufi philosophy and practice. Her most recent publication is Cultivating Charismatic Power: Islamic Leadership Practice in China (Palgrave, 2018).
From May-August 2018, she will be working with Dr Vivienne Anderson at HEDC on a collaborative research project titled ‘Rethinking the internationalisation of higher education through attention to women’s study narratives in Bangladesh and New Zealand’. This research seeks to explore the study narratives of students from the AUW and female undergraduate international students from Asia studying at the University of Otago. In the process, it will consider the similarities and differences between women’s narratives in these two very different contexts, and reflect on what can be learnt from these narratives regarding the meaning of higher education ‘internationalisation’.
The AUW is home to approximately 700 young women from 15 different countries throughout Asia including Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Palestine, Vietnam, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and China. It was originally established to provide access to tertiary education for young women from impoverished families and/or war-torn countries throughout the region. The broader collaboration thus also offers an opportunity for staff and students at the University of Otago to learn from the experiences of staff at a higher education institution which has long provided education to women who have experienced war, displacement and trauma. Moreover, it will also contribute to knowledge about the changing patterns of educational migration within Asia, offering insights into the impact of these changes for New Zealand.
Dr Cone will give a public lecture at the Dunningham Suite at the Dunedin Public Library on Thursday 2 August 2018 at 12.30pm. We will post further details closer to the time.
Professor Hallie Buckley’s seminar on the Milton cemetery
The Centre for Global Migrations and Department of History and Art History recently hosted a research seminar from Professor Hallie Buckley from the Department of Anatomy at the University of Otago. Drawing on findings from a research team of bioarchaeologists and archaeologists, the talk focused on a below-ground analysis of the St John’s cemetery at Milton, Otago, where from 200 plots only 7 are identifiable from headstones. With documentary analysis, however, local researchers have managed to identify the names of 75 folk buried there.
Professor Buckley’s team has excavated 25 graves containing 27 skeletons and the talk showcased methodologies to identify the unmarked burials through analysis of bones, teeth and DNA. Isotope analysis of teeth, for instance, can reveal an individual’s place of birth, what their diet was like as children and adults. Physiological stress can be assessed through the bones and teeth and whether they were pipe smokers. The skeletons can further be checked for Vitamin D deficiency, which may have led many early migrants to be vulnerable to other diseases such as tuberculosis. Analysis of the skeletons can also be matched to newspaper accounts of the ways people died. For instance, one press report revealed a death in Milton due to rockfall with one of the skeletons showing the physical signs of such a life-ending accident.
As well as aiding the local Milton community, Professor Buckley hopes the project will enable us to learn more about the biology of goldminers and whether identifying the presence of tuberculosis in the past can help with treatment today.
Seminar: The best of times, the worst of times: A biocultural investigation of 19th century life in Otago, New Zealand
On Wednesday 14 March 2018, in Burns 5 seminar room at 3.30pm, the Centre for Global Migrations and Department of History and Art History host a joint seminar from Professor Hallie Buckley (Anatomy) and Dr Peter Petchey (Anthropology and Archaeology).
Titled ‘The best of times, the worst of times: A biocultural investigation of 19th century life in Otago, New Zealand’, the talk will showcase how historic cemeteries provide a wealth of biological and cultural information to illuminate the health and diet of miners and early settlers, the development of a New Zealand identity, and the context of the landscapes in which these early migrants lived. It was both the best of times and the worst of times, with the promise of easy wealth but the risk of sickness of violent death.
A seminar poster can be downloaded here seminar 2018 buckley (PDF 872KB).
Global Migrations 2018 conference summary
Between 20 and 22 February 2018, the Centre for Global Migrations hosted an international conference showcasing new research from established and emerging researchers. Almost 70 speakers from Australia, the USA, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Syria […]
Report on Prof Phipps’ Public Lecture on Refugee Stories in Scotland
On 6 December 2017, Professor Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair of Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow, spoke to a capacity audience about Refugee Stories from Scotland. Beginning and ending her talk with the sea – ‘the sea has locked them up’ – Professor Phipps highlighted not a refugee ‘crisis’, but a crisis of reception and a crisis of hospitality. She spoke about the criminalisation of humanitarian endeavours that offer help to those seeking sanctuary, of containers in refugee camps being used to keep people immobile, and about the dehumanising xenophobic language of negativity and hostility that accuses refugees as stealing goods and livelihoods.
There is a need, then, for a positive discourse to circulate within the public sphere, rather than continue xenophobic tropes that have characterised the history of immigrants, including groups such as the Huguenots and the Jews. And rather than the constant re-traumatising that arises from a focus on journeys, Professor Phipps advocated utilising poetry, music and film to tell stories of meeting, greeting, and eating. People love to share their language and the audience viewed clips of various ethnicities providing welcome greetings to Scotland in their language, including from a Kiwi. With possibly the world’s first ever integration strategy, the Scottish government advocates use of the term ‘New Scots’ instead of ‘refugees’. Although ruled from Westminster and unable to legislate for immigration, Scotland does have devolved care for refugees. This can take many forms including statements such as ‘You have honoured us by making Scotland your home’.
We were honoured to have Professor Phipps so eloquently and passionately share with us her work with New Scots and the ways that Scotland is working to ensure harmonious refugee resettlement. Among such examples is the following musical collaboration, ‘A Time Will Come’, between Ghanaian artist Naa Densua Tordzro and Scottish singer and composer Karine Polwart: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/b0N1nKxcRkvWLQsdStTHw8/new-european-songbook-united-kingdom-karine-polwart-and-naa-densua-tordzro : ‘Will a time come when you might need help?’
