LSE HE Blog Special Issue in collaboration with the DV462 Film Club
To celebrate and bring awareness to Refugee Week UK, we present Refugee Realities, a series of podcasts produced by MSc students on the Forced Displacement and Refugees course in the LSE Department of International Development. In these podcasts, student hosts discuss policies, experiences, and initiatives to assist forcibly displaced people with refugees and guests from local organisations here in London and international NGOs and institutions.
Below, you will find two seasons produced by students in the 2022 and 2021 cohorts of DV462 students. Each season is divided into themes, with one to two podcasts per theme. (The latest season, S3, recently dropped.)
2022
In the second season, the student hosts cover a range of topics – the challenges facing refugee governance, the growing threat of climate-change, and the reflections of the former head of the UN’s relief agency. The voices and experiences of refugees themselves are also of crucial importance, and we hear from asylum seekers navigating life in the UK, Lebanon, and Poland.
As Refugee Realities enters its second season, Ian Madison, the convener of the series, reflects on the need and usefulness of this project in a blog post titled Student podcasts – from consuming knowledge to co-producing it
2021
The first season offers listeners an insight into the challenges facing refugee governance and recent national and international refugee policy and the experiences of refugees, as they, themselves, share how they navigated asylum processes in the UK and Austria.
Ian Madison, the convener of the Refugee Realities series of podcasts, provides context on the origin and nature of this series in a post titled, Why my students produced podcasts during a pandemic Taitum Caggiano, a student on the course and one of the podcast producers, explains why she took part and what she learned in a post titled, Connecting academic theory with the real world
For a complete listing of Refugee Week events or to get involved, check out the Refugee Week website, follow Refugee Week on Instagram and on Twitter and Facebook @RefugeeWeek. For LSE-hosted resources, here’s a post on the Careers Blog, Take Action: Refugees and Asylum Seekers and an event on The humanitarian crisis in Tigray, Ethiopia hosted by the Africa Centre and Department for International Development.
In the meantime, stay tuned for the podcasts.
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This series of podcasts was made possible by an Eden Catalyst Fund. Many thanks go to all the students who participated; Lee-Ann Sequeira, Chris Doughty, Noor Abdulghani, and Lili Schwoerer at the LSE Eden Centre for Education Enhancement; and Stuart Gordon, Anna D’Alton, Maria Do-Prado, and Dipa Patel at the LSE Department of International Development.
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Image credit: Angels Unaware by Timothy P. Schmalz. Courtesy the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Vatican Office.