CTPSR Matters - Issue 2

Commonwealth FellowsVictims & Villains ReportHorizon 2020LGBTQ Refugee Lives

CTPSR MattersResearch Newsletter, Issue 2 - 05 Feb 2016

CTPSR Matters, Issue 2

In February 2016 the CTPSR welcomes four Commonwealth Professionals, Louis Acheampong from Ghana, Eric Ngang from Cameroon, Jacinta Okwaro from Kenya and Godfrey Tumuhairwe from Uganda. All have significant experience in the environmental governance from civil society, the media, international organisations and the private sector. Over six weeks they will meet researchers and organisations in Coventry and across the country to learn more about natural resource governance and peace building in the UK. They will also share their experiences, from working in different African contexts, with colleagues across the University. The CTPSR team will also work with the Fellows to build networks and develop further collaborative research. For further information about the programme please contact [email protected] or [email protected]

CTPSR Welcomes Commonwealth Fellows

AHRC Innovation Award Contesting States of Desire: sustaining LGBTQ lives in refugee youth

In January CTPSR hosted the last of our creative workshops to mark the end of the collaboration between EJ at CTPSR, Churnjeet Mahn from the English Faculty at the University of Strathclyde and a national organisation working with young people from refugee backgrounds.

The workshop brought 13 people to the Centre to discuss race, ethnicity, queer arts and activism before creating a series of collages, photo stories and films exploring cultural and societal attitudes to race, faith and sexuality. These images show some of the creative process from an initial collage to storyboards. The final films will hopefully be screened at a CTPSR seminar later in the year as we are hoping to invite some of the participants to the Centre to show you some of the films and discuss the process (not least to show you what can be created in the blank canvas that is IV5!). In the meantime sincere thanks must go to Mike Hardy and the Centre for donating the multi-media equipment and to Jane and Ali for ordering and processing it all and arranging the logistics of the weekend.


International Studies AssociationProfessor Alp Ozerdem has been selected as Co-Chair of the Peace Section of the International Studies Association (ISA) Conventions of 2017 and 2018. The ISA conventions attract around 6,000 academics from across the world each year and they are known as one of the largest gatherings of academics working in the disciplines of politics, international relations and international studies. More information of the ISA can be found at http://www.isanet.org/

Professor Alp Ozerdem has just received a HORIZON 2020 grant of 115,000 Euros as part of a consortium that will be working on Conflict Prevention and Peace Building (CPPB) training. The PeaceTraining.eu project was selected out of 93 applications. Its total budget is over 1.5 million

Euros and will be implemented over a period of 26 months. This is the first HORIZON 2020 grant for the Centre so far, and we hope that it will lead to many more successful applications.

A New HORIZON 2020 Project

Victims orVillains

The report Victims and Villains: Migrant Voices in the British Media, published by Heaven Crawley, Simon McMahon and Katharine Jones was launched on 2nd February in an important roundtable discussion at the House of Commons in London. The event was hosted by Paul Blomfield MP, who is the Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Migration, and had excellent contributions from Roy Greenslade of The Guardian and London Evening Standard, Abdirahim Saeed, a British- Somali journalist for the BBC and our own Heaven Crawley. Rich debate followed with the audience of experts, journalists, charities and civil society organisations.

Professor Heaven Crawley at the Victims and Villains roundtable discussion, House of Lords, London.


The Guardian has published a piece on the findings of the Victims and Villains report, published by Heaven Crawley, Simon McMahon and Katharine Jones. Titled What’s missing from newspaper coverage of migration? The migrants..., the piece by Roy Greenslade provided an overview of the study, stating that it ‘cast yet more light on a subject of continuing public interest’. In the 24 hours since its publication, the piece had received over 500 comments and been shared on social media nearly 100 times.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/feb/02/whats-missing-from-newspaper-coverage-of-migra-tion-the-migrants

Supporting social entrepreneurs in Coventry

Dr. Rose Narooz is currently working on a new project focusing on co-creation of a sustainable ecosystem that supports social entrepreneurs in Coventry. She is working closely with CU enterprise hub and is a member of social enterprise steering

committee. This committee is composed of researchers, social entrepreneurs, representatives from the city council and different governmental and private supporting agencies. This is part of a larger emerging study focusing on comparing different ecosystem models across Europe and emerging economies. She is part of research group which involves researchers from 6 different UK and European institutions.

Human Rights Watch Summit

On Wednesday 3rd February Professor Heaven Crawley joined Sabir Zazai from Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre (CRMC) and Patrick Kingsley from The Guardian as one of the guest speakers at a Human Rights Watch Summit on Europe’s RefugeeCrisis held at Dean’s Yard, Westminster. Heaven was asked to


Institute for Social Studies

Gordon Crawford presented a paper at an international colloquium at the Institute for Social Studies (ISS) The Hague on 4 - 5 Feb 2016. The conference was organised by the Critical Agrarian Studies research group at ISS and entitled ‘Global governance/politics, climate justice & agrarian/social justice: linkages and challenges’. Gordon’s paper, co-authored with Gabriel Botchwey, is entitled ‘Conflict, collusion and corruption in small-scale gold mining in Ghana: Chinese miners and the state’, and is available on the conference website, see

http://www.iss.nl/research/research_programmes/political_economy_of_resources_environment_and_population_per/networks/critical_agrarian_studies_icas/icas_colloquium/global_governancepolitics_climate_justice_agrariansocial_justice/

Gordon will also present his research on this topic to the Africa Research group here on Monday 15th February at 3pm in the Boardroom.

explain the geographical and historical context of the ‘crisis’ and to provide some insights into why both the EU and individual countries of Europe have failed to develop appropriate policy responses. Afterwards Heaven spoke with Kenneth Roth, Executive Directive of HRW and Vincent Cochetel, Director of UNHCR’s Bureau for Europe about the MEDMIG research. There will be further discussions regarding potential events and meetings in New York and Geneva respectively at which the emerging research can be presented. https://www.hrw.org/re-port/2015/11/16/europes-refugee-crisis/agenda-action

PublicationsVisual activism and social justiceEJ Milne with Dr Sarah Wilson at the University of Stirling has been published by Current Sociology: 2016, Vol. 64(1) 140–156 Visual activism and social justice: Using visual methods to make young people’s complex lives visible across ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces is available via http://csi.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/64/1/140.pdf?ijkey=Glg-F53Q8xu6SqpW&keytype=finite

This paper came from an ESRC funded project ‘Young people creating belonging: Spaces, sights and sounds’. For a full pdf of the project report and research findings and for a multi-media site presenting project photos, films, music and sounds, please see www.researchunbound.org.uk/young-people-creating-belonging

Much critical social justice research, including work employing visual

methods, focuses on young people’s use of public spaces leaving domestic spaces relatively unexplored. Such research tacitly maintains modernist notions of the public/private distinction in which the private sphere is considered less relevant to concerns of social justice. However, UK crime and social justice policy has increasingly intervened in the home lives of the poorest British families. Further, such policies have been legitimated by drawing on (or not contesting) media imagery that constructs these family lives almost entirely negatively, obscuring their complexity. Drawing on childhood studies research, and a project that employed visual methods to explore belonging among young people in foster, kinship or residential care, this article examines participants’ often fragile efforts to find or forge places in which they could feel ‘at home’ and imagine a future. In so doing, it invites visual activists to reconsider their understanding of public and private spaces in order to contest prevalent unsympathetic policy representations of poorer young people’s lives, to focus greater attention on their need for support, and to extend imaginations of their futures.


Abstract:

Is there something else you’d like to see in the newsletter? Have you published an article, reviewed a chapter, spoken at a prestigious conference? We always want to hear about what you’re doing. This newsletter works when we recieve your content! If you’ve got something you’d like to share, no matter how big or small, please send it to [email protected] and we’ll make sure this is included in the next publication.

Watch this space...

Dr. Bahar Baser’s article “Transnationale Solidarität innerhalb deutscher Grenzen: Die Auswirkungen der GeziProteste auf die Diaspora aus der Türkei” has been accepted for publication in a special

issue on social movements in Europe in the Journal of Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, 16/2 . The article is about the German-Turkish Diaspora’s reactions to the Gezi Protests in Turkey in 2013 and how these events affected Turkish-German diplomatic relations.

Migration from Turkey to SwedenDr. Bahar Baser has also signed a book contract with I.B.Tauris for an edited volume which will be co-edited with Dr. Paul Levin and Prof.Hans-Ingvar Roth from Stockholm University. The book is called “Migration from Turkey to Sweden: Integration, Belonging and Transnational Community” and it is expected to be published in 2017. The book includes chapters from authors who are based in Turkey, Sweden, Belgium and the UK and it deals with various issues that have to do with the integration of migrants from Turkey in Sweden after the 50th year anniversary of the first wave of Turkish migration to Europe.

German-Turkish Diaspora

CTPSR Matters - Issue 2

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