Alison Phipps annual UNESCO RILA lecture 2020
Published: 10 June 2020
On the 18th of June, Prof Alison Phipps will be holding her 4th annual UNESCO RILA lecture, to mark World Refugee Day. Free registration through Eventbrite.
On the 18th of June at 11am, Alison Phipps will be presenting her 4th Annual UNESCO RILA lecture for World Refugee Day, jointly organised by the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Refugee Council, entitled:
Fostering Integration: making refuge real through the arts of justice & contemplative seeing.
With UNESCO RILA’s Hyab Yohannes, Hannah Thomas, Dr Giovanna Fassetta & MIDEQ’s Dr Gameli Tordzro, Naa Densua Tordzro & Tawona Sithole
Scotland has as her goal to be a society where all can flourish.
The discourse surrounding refugee integration is regularly equated with assimilation, despite significant work to critical work; intense policy programmes and legal frameworks of rights, equality, diversity and inclusion. Even when the policy and law does not operate with an assimilationist model, in practice, it is what people do. It then intersects with paradigms of race, language, gender and class to perpetuate the things which do us all harm; which prevent the flourishing. A deathliness pervades the margins – drownings, detentions, destitutions, deportations.
Hostility; violence; structural and systemic injustice, lesser opportunities for the many not the few – these are not going to lead to flourishing.
Flourishing meadows, need flourishing margins. They need to be fostered, not just welcomed.
The dominate discourse in refugee integration and since 2015 has been one using the terminology of welcome and hospitality. But that’s only the start of the story. What happens after the welcome and how do we really do the hard, piece by piece work of justice, and what Simone Weil calls ‘decreation’ to create in the bodies, homes, communities and institutions that make up our lives?
This lecture – a collage of offerings centred around a examples where a sustained non-violent practice has been fostered; ‘contemplative seeing’ (Dustin & Ziegler, 2006) and Menakem’s (2017) operationalisation of historical trauma healing through ‘clean and dirty pain’ with ‘people of culture’.
This lecture is free to attend, but registration is mandatory through Eventbrite.
First published: 10 June 2020