Refugee Week

Refugee Week 2022

Refugee Week is 20 - 26 June 2022!

Kent is proud to be an inclusive, diverse and welcoming university.

 We promote access to Higher Education for people who have fled persecution and sought asylum in the UK, providing support and scholarships through the Article 26 scheme.  

With 'healing' as the theme of Refugee Week 2022, we're celebrating community, mutual care, and the human ability to start again.

Migration and Movement

Our Migration and Movement Signature Research Theme aims to expand understanding of migration beyond the movement of people, to include the migration of pathogens, monies, technologies, cultures, scriptures, coffee, drugs, medicines, labour, and ideas. 

We are keen to foster interdisciplinary conversations on issues of migration and movement to find new ways of approaching the complex issues it brings up. 

Advocating Tolerance and Respect

Through academic research, public engagement activities and collaborations with partners, we work hard to use our platform to be an advocate for tolerance, understanding and respect for all displaced people.  

Recent examples include:

  • Hosting events such as the local leg of the largest public arts event in the world in 2021, ‘The Walk’, featuring Amal, a three-metre puppet of a young Syrian refugee girl travelling from the Middle East, through Europe to Scotland to raise awareness of the plight of refugee.
  • Supporting the Refugee Tales Project - through books, walks and gatherings, the project has been giving voice to asylum seekers and refugees in the UK since 2015.
  • Inviting our New Imaginaries Fellow, Kamila Shamsie, to deliver the 2022 TS Eliot Lecture.

As part of our ongoing public engagement work, we will be inviting Amal back to our campus on Monday 27 June between 14:00-15:00. 

Nobel Prize for Abdulrazak Gurnah

Our alumnus and Emeritus Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021.  

The Nobel Committee awarded the Prize to Professor Gurnah for ‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents'.