ISS lecturer and film maker, Katarzyna Grabska has made a documentary film about Barbara Harrel-Bond, the founder of the discipline of Forced Migration and the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, the world's first institution for the study of refugees.
- Presenter
- Presenter
- Date
- Wednesday 31 Oct 2018, 17:00 - 19:30
- Type
- Performance
- Spoken Language
- English
- Location
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, HG-01A33
The event and discussions will be focused on refugee studies as both an academic discipline/orientation and as a platform for activism and engaged scholarship.
About the film
Through the prism of an extraordinary life, this documentary explores the achievements of Barbara Harrell-Bond - academic, refugee activist and a life-long advocate of refugee rights.
The film takes us on a personal journey of a not-so-ordinary woman born in a remote town in South Dakota during the Great Depression, and traces her career from her initial engagement with the civil rights in the late Fifties, to her move to the UK in the mid-Sixties where she studied social anthropology at the University of Oxford in the 1960s, and then to her travels in West Africa where she carried out much of her academic research.
Her first-hand experience of the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria in 1980, and the humanitarian crisis in Sudan in 1982, led her to establish the first refugee studies centre in Oxford, of which she is a founding director, and numerous others around the world. A very strong advocate of legal aid programs for refugees in the Global South, Barbara established a number of these programs including in Uganda, Egypt, South Africa and the UK.
Far from being only an academic, the focus of Barbara’s life-long work has been on refugee rights, and on keeping refugees at the centre of humanitarian interventions. Issues which resonate even more deeply now, in an age in which safe havens for refugees are increasingly being eroded and violations of human rights are on the rise.
