UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

5 Apr 25

Affiliate Artist Anton Floyd will be part of Come Together for Gaza, see flyer below.

14-15 Apr 25

23 Apr 25

Book talk at Gavin's Mill in Milngavie, Scotland

Professor Alison Phipps and Khawla Badwan, the authors of ‘Keep Telling of Gaza’ a call-and-response book of poems, will read from their book, as well as talk of their experience working with colleagues in Gaza.

28 Apr 25

The Refugee Abyss: a talk by Hyab Yohannes, which draws on refugeesʼ displaced voices to foreground embodied knowledge through their lived, felt and witnessed experiences. This will be in the ARC (11 Chapel Lane, Glasgow) on 28 April, 17:30-19:00. Tickets are free and can be booked here.

8-10 May 23

Creatives of Colour Festival 2025!

Three days OF celebrating the creative contributions of people of colour, hosted by Civic House, Glad Cafe, and Glasgow Film Theatre! Iman Tajik, UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist, will show his film A to B.

9 May 25

The full UNESCO RIELA team will be at St Andrew's University for the Global Learnings from the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy event.

13-15 May 25

UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating

We are excited to announce that the theme for next year's in-person Spring School is "May peace prevail". This Spring School will focus on peacebuilding, specifically using arts, languages and education.

The call for contributions is out now!

For 2025, we invite proposals which explore how to build peace in the minds of people, how to live together peacefully, restoratively and interculturally, how to respond to and counteract current events worldwide that seek to divide societies, and how to ensure that peace prevails, founded on justice. The deadline for proposals is midnight on Tuesday 28 January 2025.

30-31 May 25

Visiting Academic Dilara Özel has had her paper 'How Can Language Learning Be a Tool for Peace and Sustainability Education?' accepted per inclusion at the 3rd International Symposium on Social Justice in ELT (SJELT 2025). The event will take place on Friday-Saturday, 30-31 May 2025 at Bahçeşehir University South Campus in Istanbul, Türkiye. The paper will be presented by co-author Ayşegül Yurtsever.

2-3 Jun25

Visitn Academic Dilara Özel will be presenting in Edinburgh at the APeCS Conference 2025: Future-Making in Times of Conflict, Violence and Insecurity, as part of Panel 10: Digital Technologies for Inclusivity and Peace: Exploring Possibilities for Preventing Online Hate Speech. Her abstract title is: Beyond the Echo Chamber: Peace Education as a Tool for Digital Coexistence.

11-13 Jun 25

Visiting Academic Dilara Özel will be presenting at the Imagining Sustainable Developments, Discussing Education Futures conference at Lancaster University, with her talk entitled "Fostering Peace Education Through Technological and Visual Tools in the Classroom".

13 Jun 25

We will be hosting an event as part of Refugee Festival Scotland and Glasgow Science Festival. Top secret for now, but more info to follow at the end of April.

14 Jun 25

As part of Refugee Festival Scotland, Tawona Sitholé and Dilara Özel will be hosting a family-friendly workshop entitled Ties That Bind: Discovering Family Stories Through Conversation and Art. They invite children age 8-11 and their families to explore identity and connection through conversation and creativity. 

More information and free tickets: TiesThatBindRFS2025.eventbrite.co.uk 

We will host a travelling exhibition, showcasing work by UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artists Hannah Rose Thomas and Robert McNeil, as part of the remembrance events around the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide. Here is where you can view the paintings:

23 June - 6 July: University Chapel
7 - 10 July: Advanced Research Centre, ground floor
11 - 18 July: School of Education, 5th floor gallery

24 Jun 25

Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum

Esa Aldegheri will be a keynote speaker at this interdisciplinary symposium asking how creative practices have been used to inhabit, expose, navigate or contest global geographies of asylum in the twenty-first century. Taking place at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Displaced Arts will explore the potential of arts – including literature, life-writing, storytelling, poetry, community theatre, photography, and film – to illuminate geographies of asylum which have been reshaped by increasingly securitised border regimes, narratives of a ‘refugee crisis’, and a rapidly growing asylum-industrial complex.

The call for papers is available here and is open until Wednesday 15 January 2025.

24 Jun 25

Hyab Yohannes will be speaking at the first ever Global Forum for Human Trafficking Survivors - Voices of Resilience, held in Vienna. On 22 November 2021, the United Nations General Assembly called for the active involvement of survivors in shaping anti-trafficking, victim-centered, and trauma-informed efforts. The forum, organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) with the financial support of the European Union (EU), will place survivors at the centre and highlight the importance of listening to and learning from them. More information can be found here.

27 Jun 25

Memorial event hosted in the University Chapel, to commemorate the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, 30 years after it took place. No need to book tickets, just come to the chapel.

17-18 Jul 25

Alison Phipps will be at the UK UNESCO Chairs conference in Portsmouth.

26 Jul 25

Blina Shama UK Annual Gathering. This will take place in Leeds. More info to follow.

6-14 Sep 25

Hyab Yohannes will present at the Curious festival. Curious is the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s festival of knowledge. It brings together a range of leading thinkers and invites curious minds to gather, learn, discuss big ideas, ask questions, and explore diverse topics over two weeks of free events. Hyab will be talking about his book The Refugee Abyss.

8-12 Sep 25

Visiting academic Dilara Özel, PhD candidates Sevinj Rustamova and Samira Hasanzade will be presenting their work at the Emerging Researchers Conference (ECR), on 8 September 2025. Their session is called Beyond Words: Silent Paths to Peace.

Following the ERC, is the European Conference for Educational Research (ECER) 2025 “Charting the Way Forward: Education, Research, Potentials and Perspectives”, which will take place at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, 8 - 12 September 2025. Dilara and Ayşegül Yurtsever will present another paper called Bridging Language and Peace: Exploring the Intersection of Sustainability and Peace Education.

9-11 Sep 25

Alison Phipps and Hyab Yohannes will deliver a keynote speech entitled Out of the Rubble: Refugee Language Education in Times of Heartbreak and Failure, at the BERA (British Educational Research Association) Annual Conference 2025, at the University of Sussex.

Visiting academic Dilara Özel will also be at the conference to deliver a workshop entitled "Building Theory and Practice: The Critical Need for Research-Driven Approaches in Peace Education"