Bhutanese Refugees is a new website which is a collaboration between PhotoVoice and the Bhutanese Refugee Support Group, who have both have worked closely with Bhutanese refugees. The website includes audio and video of refugees telling their personal stories.
Situated between the emerging superpowers of India and China, the isolated Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, hailed by some as ‘the last Shangri-La’, has generated one of the highest numbers of refugees in the world in proportion to its population.
Since 1991 over one sixth of Bhutan’s peoples have sought asylum in Nepal, India and other countries around the world.
The film Playing Between Elephants is now available to view online. The film was produced by Aryo Danusiri, Bruno Dercon and UN-HABITAT and has just won the Human Rights Award at the Jakarta International Film Festival 2007. It documents a post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, where an international body that is assigned to build houses, while an Acehnese village chief leads his people through the ups and downs of the ongoing reconstruction and rehabilitation process. The film very intimately shows how complicated it is to survive a traumatic event and then experience global intervention. Rebuilding a house in post-tsunami Aceh brings into play the whole world and forces the Acehnese people learn to deal with the friction between the global and local realms.
In November 2007, the FMO team established a network of advisors for the OARS project, comprised of representatives of higher education (HE) institutions in the UK. Students, researchers and academics from universities and colleges form the backbone of FMO’s user community. It is therefore important to involve them in the FMO portal’s redevelopment and enhancement.
On behalf of the FMO team, the Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Professor Roger Zetter, wrote to academic departments and centres in the UK requesting their input. They were asked to complete a brief questionnaire about their usage and opinions of FMO. This information will be used to inform the team in its work to make the enhancements to FMO through the OARS project.
We would strongly encourage all users of FMO - whether or not they be in the HE sector and/or in the UK – to contribute to the OARS project and assist the team in making the most appropriate changes to FMO to benefit all users. Further details can be found on the OARS project website, and the questionnaire can be completed and submitted online.
Whilst FMO is continuing to expand it’s video section, YouTube is undoubtedly the most popular repository of videos on the Internet (accounting for more than 60% of all videos watched online in the US). Although it might be written off by some as only having entertainment value, there are in fact many individuals and organisations who are using YouTube (and other video sharing services) to broadcast their message to the world. Searching the YouTube website can often uncover films about forced migration, not only from FMO, but key organisations such as UNHCR (FMO is not responsible for the content of external web sites).
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.
People on the move: A Fedora-based Open Access Repository To Provide a World of Information on Forced Migration
Ithaca, NY— September 10, 2007
Anyone who has put a web site together about an interesting topic has seen its content expand in proportion to interest and use. Good information tends to become more complex over time as web site displays, interactive features, new kinds of content, web services, and access to multiple data storage facilities are added. Management of even modest online information facilities can end up being perceived by users as a patchwork of access and preservation — elegant pieces cleverly stitched together without an plan for how the information will persist — a liability for those who may need it most.
The Open Access Repository System (OARS) Project has plans to migrate just such a collection of significant, well-used, and yet fragmented resources from the Forced Migration Online (FMO) Digital Library, a digital repository of scholarly resources based at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, to an open source platform based on Fedora in the next two years. With funding from JISC, the OARS repository will be the largest on its subject area in the world representing a unique and expanding collection of resources highly valued by the user community it serves. The OARS repository will improve management, and will also interoperate with other global open access systems, as well as with the University of Oxford’s institutional repository. The repository’s long-term preservation will be ensured by compliance with JISC Information Environment open source software and open standards. Ultimately, the new repository will help create an information environment about forced migration that is discoverable and accessible to a much wider community of users and contributors.
Force Migration Online (FMO) contains regional resources, multimedia, journals handbooks and guidelines and working papers that address what happens when people have to leave their homes or homelands to escape from political or natural disasters. FMO uses the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) definition for forced migration: “A general term that refers to the movements of refugees and internally displaced people (people displaced by conflicts) as well as people displaced by natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects.”
The Oxford Research Archive (ORA) team are also using the Fedora repository system for the construction of the University of Oxford’s institutional repository. The ORA team has developed an open source management and search interface for Fedora. The OARS Project will develop a browser–based management and search interface for their Fedora–based repository based on the ORA work and in compliance with ORA open standards.
For more information on the OARS Project contact Mike Cave, Co-Director or Sean Loughna, Co-Director.
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.
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.
The country of Afghanistan is ethnically, linguistically, and physically diverse. This updated Afghanistan research guide covers the nation’s long history, from ancient Sarzameen-e-Bay, through to the Soviet occupation, the rise of the Taliban, the aftermath of 9/11 and concludes with a current political overview.
Twenty three years of civil war in Afghanistan created large numbers of refugees and IDPs - many of whom have returned home over the last six years following the fall of the Taliban in 2001. For many, their search for employment, adequate and affordable housing, access to basic services, reclamation of property, and reintegration into communities has been fraught with difficulty. At the same time, return is made difficult or in some cases impossible as peace and security remains illusive in some parts of the country. As the country struggles along the long road of reconstruction, the durability of the return is dependent on the establishment of the state - its institutions and the establishment of the rule of law - and its ability to create opportunities within an environment of security which enables its citizens to thrive rather than simply survive. Throughout, significant challenges lie ahead as Afghanistan’s development indicators continue to be poor. An estimated 20-40 per cent of rural Afghans are malnourished, and roughly 70 per cent of the population live on less than USD 2 a day. Over two-thirds of Afghans over the age of 15 cannot read and write; and one in five children die before they reach their fifth birthday.
