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.
