Professor Alison Phipps, OBE, D.Litt. (honoris causa Edinburgh and Waterloo), PhD, BA (Hons), FRSE, FRSA, FAcSS
From April 2024 until April 2025, Alison will be on study leave. During this time she will check her email less frequently. Urgent request can be forwarded to unesco-riela@glasgow.ac.uk.
Alison is the University of Glasgow’s holder of the UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language, and Arts. This is the only Chair worldwide with an explicit focus on the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of displaced peoples and the cultures from which they came, cultures traversed and cultures where protection and settlement have been granted. The Chair's work focuses on indigenous peoples displaced historically and internally as well as those categorised as people seeking asylum and refugees displaced over international borders. Alison also holds a personal chair in Languages and Intercultural Studies and has been Adjunct Professor of Hospitality and Tourism at Auckland University of Technology (2016), Aotearoa New Zealand, and at University of Waikato (2013), as well as Thinker in Residence at University of South Australia (2016).
In a career spanning over 30 years, Alison has taught refugee studies, theatre studies, languages, religious and spiritual education, tourism and hospitality, anthropology and intercultural education and education for non-violence. She is an Ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council and Independent Chair of the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy – a partnership between the Scottish Government, the Scottish Refugee Council and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA; all 32 of Scotland’s councils).
In 2023 Alison was awarded Honorary Doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Waterloo, Canada. She has delivered numerous distinguished and named lectures worldwide from across multiple disciplines and contexts.
In 2018 Alison was the De Carle Distinguished Visiting Professor at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand and delivered the Distinguished lecture series in the UNESCO City of Literature on Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She was also the Inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Waikato in 2013, and Adjunct Professor of Hospitality and Tourism. In 2011 she was voted ‘Best College Teacher’ by the student body and received the Universities ‘Teaching Excellence Award’ for a Career Distinguished by Excellence. In 2012 she received an OBE for Services to Education and Intercultural and Interreligious Relations in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2019 she received the Minerva Medal from the Royal Philosophical Society, for services to the Arts and Humanities. She has been foster mother to an unaccompanied minor from Eritrea since 2009.
Alison has over 30 years' research experience in using creative and intercultural methodologies, including participant observation in multilingual communities, work across mobilities (international students, modern linguists, tourists, migrant, refugee communities, international NGOs) and overseas. She has undertaken research, cultural and advisory work in Palestine, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France, USA, Portugal, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Malysia, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, China, Jordan, Egypt, Haiti, and Brazil. She has produced and directed theatre and performance in Germany, the UK, Jamaica, Ethiopia and Ghana, and worked in a voluntary capacity as creative liturgist with the World Council of Churches from 2008-2011 for the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation. She regularly advises public, governmental and third sector bodies on migration and language policy. From 1999-2004 she was Inaugural Chair of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC).
In 2013 Alison was awarded a grant of £2 Million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under its Translating Cultures programme, as Principal Investigator to undertake a project entitled Researching Multilingually at the Borders of the Body, Language, Law and the State.
This was followed by a further grant of £250k, and by a Directorship as a co-Investigator with the £20 million Global Challenge Research Fund South South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub (MiDEQ). In 2019 Alison was awarded a further £2 million for a project working with SDG5 and SDG16 to enable the leadership and participation of women and girls in civic cultural institutions in Morocco, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Palestine and Mexico. She has led a partnership implementing a grant of £6.5 million with COSLA, Scottish Refugee Council and Scottish Government supporting New Scots from 2020-2023. She has extensive research and cultural networks across the Global South with projects actively under contract in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, China, Nepal, Malaysia, Egypt, Jordan, Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. She is explicitly working with UNESCO Creative Cities, notably with Dunedin, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and with World Heritage Sites in Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and with the UNESCO Chair - Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial y Diversidad Cultural in Mexico. She was awarded further funding through a joint application lead by the Scottish Government, with Scottish Refugee Council and COSLA, to develop work on Refugee Integration and expand its potential internationally through her research networks. She authored the first draft of UNESCO’s Guidelines for Education in a Multilingual World, to be published in 2025.
Alison is well used to working at the intersection of public, private, NGO and third sector bodies, not least with regard to refugee and migrant protection, protection of intangible cultural heritage, and international development. Previously, this involved leadership of teams working in Uganda, Ghana, the Gaza Strip, Bulgaria, Romania, the U.S.A. (borderlands of Arizona), the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, working in at least 15 different languages and with a highly diverse team of researchers and artists. This work occurred during the hospitality crisis (so called ‘refugee crisis’) and involved a step change in public profile and engagement from the specifics of research to the general headline engagements of capacity strengthening across a population and especially civil society.
A key stream of work from the AHRC Large Grant was the improvisation and devising of a large-scale production on refugee tropes in Ghana in 2015-2016 with indigenous and displaced young peoples and a team of artists and researchers from across the Global South. This involved 6 weeks of intense work and a successful production filmed for National Ghana TV in September 2016, Broken World, Broken Word. Alison co-directed the production and was Executive Producer of the Documentary and Production films. She repeated this work with a Global Mental Health team in July 2017, co-directing, researching and executive producing two further hour-long documentaries and productions. In addition, she led a ‘summer school’ and coordinated talks from leading Ghana Scholars of African Humanities and Ghana Linguistics, with young displaced and indigenous peoples in their communities.
This work has been followed by a number of further awards from the Global Challenge Research Fund with a focus on refugee integration through languages and the arts. Alison's diverse team, which includes refugee and migrant background artists and scholars, is now engaged in a further multi-million-pound project linked to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Alison has authored major international policy reports for the European Commission, UNESCO, UNCHR, UNRISD and the Scottish Government.
In addition, Alison is a regular keynote and plenary speaker and has given a range of named lectures including: the Sir Run Run Shaw Lecture, Stonybrook; the inaugural Joy Northcott Memorial Lecture, Edinburgh; the Healthy Societies Lecture, Sydney; the De Carle Lecture Series, Otago University; The Trinity Newman Lecture, Victoria University Wellington; The Modern Languages Association plenary, and many more.
Personal motivation, attributes, competencies and other experience
Alison is highly motivated and brings great commitment, creative insight and energy to her work. She is no stranger to committee work both in Distinguished Societies and Research Councils, as well as with many small community organisations. She was a senior policy advisor to the British Council from 2007-2014 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015, and of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2017. Alison previously served on the International Committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for seven years, with a brief to extend its work into the Global South. She Chaired the Advisory Board for the Arts and Humanities Research Council International Advisory Board 2018-2021 and Chairs the New Scots Refugee Integration Group for the Scottish Government in partnership with COSLA and the Scottish Refugee Council. She also chairs the UK and Ireland Academies Human Rights Committee and the Human Rights Committee for the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She sits on the senior oversight committee for the Ukrainian Refugee Response for the Scottish Government.
Alison served on the Board of Noyam Institute for African Dance, Ghana, and serves as an advisory board member for five Global Challenge Research Fund projects, as well as the new Open World Research Initiative lead from Cambridge University. For eight years she served a Board Member of Right to Remain, a refugee advocacy organisation, and has worked as an advisor to organisations from the Red Cross to the Scottish Refugee Council, the Church and Society Committee of Church of Scotland to Scottish, U.K. and European Parliaments. She was also a Commissioner with the Poverty Truth Commission, Scotland, Advisor to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Ethiopia (CAHDE), to the AHRC GCRF Modern Slavery project and to MEITS, Cambridge University. In 2015 she designed and led a witness-bearing five-day visit with members of the Home Affairs and Justice Select Committee to Calais and Dunkirk refugee camps in France. She is a member of the Iona Community.
Alison is author and co-author of numerous academic books and articles and a regular international keynote speaker and broadcaster. Her most recent monograph is Decolonising Multilingualism (2019). She has regular columns in The National and Scottish broadsheet press and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio Scotland’s ethics programme on a Sunday morning. Her column is often one of The National's top ten most-read columns. She is also a published poet with her latest anthology and audiobook being with the Zimbabwean poet Tawona Sitholé, The Warriors who do not Fight, in 2018 and Keep Telling of Gaza with Khawla Badwan in 2024. Alison has published over 70 books as series editor on Tourism and Cultural Change with Professor Mike Robinson, focusing on tangible and intangible cultural heritage and tourism worldwide, and has published and broadcast her research widely in the field of European languages, multilingualism, tourism and intercultural studies, and anthropology, as well as in the field of Higher Education Studies, with keynote addresses across all disciplines from engineering to anesthetics, to tourism and hospitality management, Information Technology and Pediatrics, as well as contemporary arts and a range of public lectures. For ten years she was co-editor of the series Languages, Intercultural Communication and Education and is on the editorial board of Language and Intercultural Communication and Hospitality and Society.