A gift of £1.3 million from the IKEA Foundation has recently been announced in support of Refugee Studies at Oxford. The support will fund a three-year Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, which will be integrated into activities at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC). In addition, research on the economic lives and contributions of refugees in three countries is being supported along with the creation of RSC summer school bursaries for participants from the global South.
The IKEA Foundation Research Fellowship will enable an early-career researcher to undertake research of importance to the Foundation, with a focus on refugees. The new Fellow, Dr Kathrin Bachleitner, will be based at Lady Margaret Hall and the RSC for three years. Dr Bachleitner is a political scientist who has worked previously in the Middle East with Palestinian refugees. She intends to embark on research into how historical memory has shaped European states’ policies towards Syrian refugees.
The research supported through the gift will focus on the RSC’s refugee economies work in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. The insights that emerge from this research will be used to inform humanitarian policy and practice to benefit refugees in the long term. This project follows on from research previously undertaken by the centre into refugee economies in Uganda and Kenya. The main focus of the research is to build an unprecedented panel data set on the economic lives and impact of refugees and hosts in these three countries across a three-year period.
The bursaries for the RSC International Summer School in Forced Migration will facilitate the participation of greater numbers of low-income participants from the global South, and will thus build capacity within the humanitarian sector.
Outgoing Refugee Studies Centre Director, Professor Alexander Betts, who leads the Refugee Economies Programme, said:
‘This is an extremely exciting collaboration for the Refugee Studies Centre, enabling us to scale-up our work on the economic lives and impact of refugees while building our capacity for research, teaching and impact.’
Annemieke Tsike-Sossah de Jong, Head of Portfolio, Reshaping Humanitarian Response said:
‘The IKEA Foundation believes innovative research can help develop practical solutions to real-world problems, and that is why we are funding the Refugee Studies Centre and the IKEA Foundation Research Fellowship.’