Between January 6th and 10th 2008, the 11th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) conference was hosted by the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program of the American University in Cairo. The Forced Migration Online team attended to participate and record audio at the plenary events for the FMO podcast series. Details of the podcastswill be have been posted on this blog in the next few weeks.
Our conference round-up begins with a video review of the event produced by the IASFM rapporteur John Nassari. The video is a part of the rapporteur’s conference report, along with a more traditional oral report which was delivered in the final plenary session of the conference. The video report features participants reading quotes which were originally spoken by others during the conference.
This podcast was recorded at the Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture which was on Wednesday 21 November 2007 at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Refugee Studies Centre, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan gave the lecture and spoke on the subject of human rights and refugees.
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.
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.
