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.
- Dr Anoosheh’ Rostamkalaei from the Kent Business School gives her expert view on Refugees and the Road to Successful Entrepreneurship.
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.
Inspirational stories
Read our staff and student stories on migration.
Refugee's experience inspires her PhD at Kent
Basma Taysir El Doukhi shares her experience as a Palestinian Stateless refugee.
Two Ukrainian students hosted by Kent lecturer
Marina Vosmirova and Ernest Sirota, both 20, have moved into the Tonbridge home of Dr Ruth Herbert, a music psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Kent.
Project with at-risk Syrian academics
The School of English’s Dr Bahriye Kemal has been leading an important project together with Syrian academics, alongside Cara (Council for At-Risk Academics), the Royal Society and the British Academy.
Law Clinic stories
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Expert comment: Afghan refugees
Sheona York, an immigration specialist at the Kent Law Clinic talks about Afghan refugees in the UK
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What’s been happening at Kent Law School
Discover the opportunities our law students enjoyed last Spring
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Expert view: Criminalise those fleeing oppression?
Kent Law Clinic Solicitor Sheona York asks if it's logical to criminalise those fleeing persecution
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A winning end to an extraordinary year
The Kent Law Clinic ended the year 2020 on a high with a virtual graduation and Kent Student Awards
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'.