About us
The growing number of refugees in recent years has affected all areas of Dutch society. Consequently, discussions on refugee integration have been a central topic of debate in the Netherlands. Several municipalities, organizations and local initiatives have experimented with innovative approaches to enhance inclusivity and enlarge the social participation of refugees. However, no single party involved can provide all the answers. Bringing together the knowledge and experience of refugees themselves, advocates, scientists, policymakers and social partners is therefore of the utmost importance.
Connecting knowledge
The Refugee Academy organizes regular meetings that bring together a growing number of practitioners, policymakers, researchers and engaged individuals (with and without a refugee background) to discuss and reflect on different themes connected to the inclusion of refugees in the Netherlands. In the meetings, the refugee perspective is prioritized by connecting policy views and organizational agendas to refugees’ life stories, and by inviting professionals with a refugee background to actively contribute to the debate about refugee inclusion.
The Refugee Academy offers an infrastructure for connecting existing academic, professional and practical knowledge to bring research and practice closer together. Collectively, these different forms of knowledge help people to think and reflect about the necessary societal conditions for making efforts towards integration inclusive in the long term. With its approach, the Refugee Academy makes it possible to establish unorthodox connections, whereby the learning and reflective capacities of those involved are increased and actions can be formulated.
Research
The Refugee Academy’s research is aimed at enhancing the learning abilities and reflective capacities of all parties involved, i.e. policy makers, governmental agencies, businesses, NGOs, civil society and researchers. We frequently organise public meetings on different themes and address some of these themes and research projects in collaboration with societal partners. Current and past research themes were:
- Community initiatives and sustainable connections: What are conditions that enable and constrain civil society initiatives in the Netherlands that aim to contribute to the societal inclusion of refugees? How do they include refugee’s perspectives?
- Full participation of newcomers by strengthening the role of employers: What are workable strategies to engage businesses to help with the challenge to offer a career path for refugees in the Netherlands?
- Entrepreneurship among newcomers: How do refugee entrepreneurs engage within the Dutch entrepreneurship ecosystem through the work/assistance of supporting organizations (so-called social entrepreneurs-incubators)?
- Amplifying the impact of refugee-led organisations and refugee advocates in Dutch policymaking: What constraints and possibilities emerge from the experiences of currently active refugee advocates? What are lessons learned from the past? How can we re-conceptualise the role of refugee advocacy today?
- Crisis governance or governance crisis?: How do we build a sustainable model for long-term refugee reception and integration? We might agree or disagree with the term ‘crisis’, but this frame helps to consider future changes in the refugee influx and everyday practical challenges that different organizations face. What are the various stakeholders (state agencies, NGO’s and new organizations) learning or what have they learned about refugee reception during this crisis and where can we go from there?
For more information on current themes and projects please see our project page.
History
Imagine what would happen if you were given a new chance to live. What energy would be released? Imagine a spiral, compressed for years, that pops open when someone is safe. That is exactly what happens with many refugees. In their first year, most spirals jump forward full of energy, eager to prove themselves. Soon, however, they encounter difficulties in understanding the complex bureaucracy of their new countries. This is especially true of strong welfare states – such as the Netherlands – where the bureaucracy is described as flat and accessible, but in practice is layered and complex.
The images, assumptions and prejudices that often block participation need reflection. This requires innovative infrastructures that shake up the “taken-for-granted” biases, in thought and practice. Engaged science, by connecting academic and local knowledge, can provide reflection and change toward participation. With this idea in mind, Halleh Ghorashi and Elena Ponzoni created the Refugee Academy in 2017. The Refugee Academy can be seen as a horizontal learning and reflective infrastructure, a kind of capacity building, connecting existing knowledge and perspectives on refugee inclusion from multiple positions.
The idea for the Refugee Academy comes from several innovative, small-scale engaged research projects in which researchers collaborated with different social actors (scientists, professionals and refugees/migrants) to bring new dimensions to refugee inclusion. An inspiring example is Sarah’s story.
Sarah rediscovers her forgotten story
An engaged academic project focused on refugee inclusion brought together various stakeholders (refugees, policymakers, HR managers, NGOs working with refugees) to discuss issues of diversity, power and participation. The most poignant example of this project comes from Sarah, who came to the Netherlands as a refugee 10 years earlier. When Sarah was asked to describe the moment in her life where she felt the strongest, she replied, “I don’t think I have such a story.” After encouragement from the group to think about what aspects of her story she would describe as powerful, she remained silent. “I don’t know,” she replied confused. […] After several sessions in silence, Sarah finally told an amazing story of herself as a young woman fighting for her own and other women’s freedom in an oppressive, male-ruled environment in Eritrea. She eventually joins the armed struggle for her country’s freedom there, leaving behind her family, social position and her everyday securities.
Stories like Sarah’s demonstrate the urgent need to improve the reflective capacity of relevant stakeholders in positions of power (including academics) by connecting to refugees’ life worlds. Documenting and analyzing refugees’ stories of their struggles for participation, and engaging with those stories within a structure such as Refugee Academy, help us identify the tasks-for-granted sources of exclusion and create conditions for movement toward inclusion. This engaged methodology helps us bring policy, research and initiatives for change closer to refugees’ lives. Only then is it possible to create together sustainable structures for a dignified life and survival of refugees.
The above text is an abridged version of a recently published text by Prof. Halleh Ghorashi with illustrations by Parisa Akbarzadehpoladi, published in C. Nevejan and H.A. Farès (Ed.) Values for Survival: Cahier1, pp. 116-117.