CERII Education Research Seminar Series: Restorative Integration: Place, Prospects and Permaculture in Practices of Refuge for All

Abstract
“Integration” – like all terms preceding it, is problematic and subject to a good deal of critical engagement. During times of critical returns to decolonial perspectives, it is especially contested as a term, not least as different actors deploy the term and associate discourse with the term which is ideological and competing. This is the case with all terms which work in a zone of conflict and contestation. Whilst it is comfortable for academic debate to remain in the critical zone, developing ever more trenchant arguments for or against a particular way of proceeding, this seminar will instead focus on the practices of restorative integration that are being producing through a focus on place and on permacultural design.

Taking the work of the UNESCO Chair at the University of Glasgow as a point of departure and present the research findings from the New Scots Research Report, this seminar will offer nuances and pathways beyond the critical integration impasse and demonstrate ways in which creativity and connections can be formed to the restorative benefit, fractally, of people and places within different jurisdictions.

Speaker’s Biography
Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She was De Carle Distinguished Visiting Professor at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand 2019-2020, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia in 2016, Visiting Professor at Auckland University of Technology, and Principal Investigator for AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state’; for Cultures of Sustainable Peace, and is now co-Director of the Global Challenge Research Fund South South Migration Hub. She is Ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council. She received an OBE in 2012 and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2023. She is an academic, activist, educator and published poet and a member of the Iona Community.

Register for free on Eventbrite.