In this podcast Professor Elizabeth Colson is in conversation with Dr Anna Schmidt. Elizabeth Florence Colson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in anthropology addresses politics, religion, social organisation, social change, migration, anthropological history, and theory and the ethnography of Africa and North America. Colson is best know for her field work with the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia which began in 1956, through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as a control study of the social change caused by forced resettlement. All of Colson’s work is solidly anchored in ethnography and through it she has made theoretical contributions to the subdisciplines of applied development and political anthropology. Colson was also one of a group of academics that played an important role in consolidating the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford in its early years, working closely with the former director, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and the development officer at the time, Belinda Allan. Dr Anna Schmidt is a political scientist who gained her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
The film Youth as Evaluators: Contested Spaces and Identity is now available to view online. In this documentary, young people talk about their countries and the issues that young people face there. The documentary was filmed during a gathering of young people involved in Public Achievement and similar programmes around the world (including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Finland, Netherlands, and Northern Ireland) at the Corrymeela Centre, Ballycastle, Northern Ireland 11 - 22 August 2005. The focus of the event was on training participants as evaluators of their youth programmes at home, and on creating an international network of young people interested in improving young people’s experience of being civic co-creators.
The web page for the video Lost Nation: Stories from the Uyghur diaspora has been updated to feature the interviews as 5 individual films. These can be viewed in a web browser (QuickTime or Flash format) or via iTunes.
Enver Tohti, London Discusses personal migration and Uyghur Chinese relations
Gulamettin Emet, New York Discusses his personal migration in 1940s to India, then Turkey and Germany before being the first Uyghur to settle in the USA
Enver Can, Munich Discusses personal migration and treatment of Uyghurs in Afghanistan and China.
In this podcast Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and Prof Roger Zetter discuss the evolution of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) and of the academic field of refugee studies or forced migration studies. As the founding former director of the RSC and the current director respectively, and with a long shared history of collaboration since the centre was established, Harrell-Bond and Zetter are well placed to discuss its early years and the changes it has undergone. In this conversation, they also talk about the current state of refugee protection and the asylum process, and examine the responses of the international community, particularly UNHCR.
As part of its expanding collection of multimedia resources, the FMO team have launched a series of podcasts. These audio resources comprise a series of discussions between experts on forced migration issues from the academia, practitioner organizations and international agencies. In the near future, the team plan to add interviews and life histories of refugees and other displaced people.
In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at Oxford (which hosts FMO), we are beginning this series of podcasts with a collection of conversations with prominent academics, in which they discuss the evolution the field of refugee and forced migration studies. The first of these is with the founder and former Director of the RSC, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond.
The podcasts are in MP3 audio format. They can be listened to in-page by clicking on the provided Flash player or via iTunes through the link provided. They can also be downloaded for later listening or for transferring to a portable MP3 compatible device device such as an iPod.
One of the other web projects that Forced Migration Online are currently involved with is Mursi Online. The website officially went live today and was developed by the FMO team at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, and funded by the Christensen Fund of Palo Alto, California. The website has many features including video clips and an image gallery. Mursi Online is intended to be a source of information and news about the Mursi, and a place where the pressures and challenges facing them today can be described and discussed, increasingly, it is hoped, by Mursi themselves.
The film Frontiers of the San Francisco Treaty in Hokkaido is now available to view online. In this documentary, former residents of the Kurile islands talk about their migration from the islands and their hopes of returning to their homeland. The film is supplemented by audio interviews with key academics on the subject. The resource page for the film is also available in Japanese and Russian.
There will be a screening of the film ‘Lost Nation: Stories from the Uyghur Diaspora’ at the Nissan Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, on Thursday, 31st May 6pm-7.30pm.
In the film, Five Uyghurs from five cities around the world tell their personal story of migration from Xinjiang (East Turkistan).
