Will Brehm  1:17
Ian Cook and Prem Kumar Rajaram, welcome to FreshEd.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  1:21
Hello

Ian Cook  1:21
Thank you.

Will Brehm  1:21
So, congratulations on your new co-edited collection. It is big and insightful and has so many different resources. And I’m sure we won’t be able to touch on all of it today. But to sort of kick it off, I guess the way I would start the conversation is about trying to think through what a displaced student is. So, how would you begin to think through what a displaced student is?

Prem Kumar Rajaram  1:42
Well, I think it’s important first to start with the idea that there’s many forms of displacement. And it’s also interesting to think about the fact that there are displaced students existing invisibly in university. In many ways, students who have experienced homelessness are displaced. It’s not just the political displacement of people like refugees but there are groups of people who are displaced from nation states from the way in which we typically arrange our political, economic, and cultural systems. So, I think when we think about displacement it’s good to think about different types of borders that people are displaced from. There are cultural borders, economic borders, where students come from, historically marginalized groups within a nation, they’re displaced from them. Attention is paid, and we pay attention in this book, to people who are displaced from their home countries -spatially displaced. And then they encounter another form of displacement when they enter into a host country because they are politically displaced, they’re often culturally displaced. But I think we also make the point that we can’t do everything in the book. And there are differences between people from a marginalized community within a particular country, and a refugee, an asylum seeker. But there also are connections. And we’ve chosen to focus on people who are called refugees. But we also understand the experience of displacement is common to many groups, and it’s multiply located when we think about it in terms of displacement from political borders, economic systems, cultural borders.

Will Brehm  3:12
This displacement would be -it’s both sort of a choice, but also something that’s put on to certain individuals without their choice.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  3:20
Yeah. And I think that’s interesting. I mean, the question of choice, it’s also important to problematize that a little bit because a lot of people are forcibly displaced, you know, that’s the term. But there is an element of choice and agency there, which is important to emphasize. And when someone leaves a country to go somewhere else, they’re not just victims of broader forces, there is an element of autonomous choice, I think, we think. But it is important also to note that they are fleeing conditions of economic, political insecurity. And then they experience another form of displacement, we think, when they enter into host countries because they are displaced from economic systems, cultural systems, and across multiple institutions whether it’s the large state institutions, or the other institutions like the university. It doesn’t have to be that way but it can be that way.

Ian Cook  4:11
Yeah. Maybe if I just follow up on that. Some of the things that we know from working with students who have experienced displacement is that even though you can’t say, “Okay, here’s a long list of things that mark these students out”, there are often recurring things that we notice from the work that we do -working in programs that try to open up the university, and also from the book as well is that- sometimes it’s things like missing documents, right? That universities are not very good traditionally at accepting. It’s like, “Well, do you have a degree? Prove it. Where’s your piece of paper”? And if somebody didn’t bring that piece of paper with them when they had to leave in a hurry, or they lost it along the way, then they face big barriers. Sometimes it’s about not recognizing, even if you have a piece of paper, about not recognizing different educational systems when they arrive in a host country and how this is translated or not. I mean, we know people who’ve had to go back to school before they can get into university.

Will Brehm  5:03
So, you’re saying that on the one hand, there’s an element of bureaucracy and the paperwork. And if you don’t have the right paperwork, or you left the paperwork, or the paperwork got lost or damaged, it’s hard to prove in a bureaucratic way that you obtained some qualification or degree. But then you’re also saying something about just differences in education systems and that being a sort of challenge for the learner? Or like, what’s the challenge when it comes to differences in education systems?

Ian Cook  5:31
Big, like both. So, on one hand, it’s a challenge for the teacher and the learner and for everybody. It’s about recognizing different forms of knowledge that may have been learned in very different systems, and both inside and outside the university and whether or not that is valued in the classroom and valued as part of learning. Because if you think about it, first of all, if you arrive to Europe -which the book is mostly about Europe- then with course, we’ve all gone through a very particular form of education. And I mean in the social sciences and humanities but also in the natural sciences. Certain ways to think about certain things. Certain forms of epistemologies that we don’t even question on a day-to-day basis inside the university. But then sometimes you have people who come in a very different tradition, or who’ve experienced that tradition mediated by colonial or post-colonial structures as well. And then they’re in the classroom. And often unfortunately, I guess their learning is viewed through the prism of lack, you know? This is what they’re lacking. They’re lacking the same things that the European students has got and how do we then integrate those students into educational structures by overcoming that lack. And that’s a big problem, we think, in the book. And the different chapters in the book show that because that basically means that the student can never really be fully valued as a student who brings with them the sort of depth -the learning that they’ve done in very different contexts and learnings that they’ve done outside of universities in a meaningful way, and where they’re seen as an individual human who is able to learn and grow. Instead, they’re seen as someone who needs to be pulled up to speed to fit in with the rest of the existing educational structures.

Will Brehm  7:07
That’s quite fascinating. So, it sounds like the discourse around it is that the student needs to change, not the university or the program, and the courses that are being offered need to change. The student needs to learn how to sort of get into line with what we offer.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  7:21
Yes, and yet again, I think in most universities, there’s a certain idea of the student. Sometimes it is cast as the ideal students, sometimes it is cast as the normal student. You know, a certain student has gone through a certain linear trajectory of education, all the way from kindergarten through finishing high school. There are assumptions that they have support of a nuclear family, of certain types of financial resources, etc., etc., etc. And this idea of an ideal student is something which some students can measure up to. Sometimes it’s because they have certain types of resources, sometimes because they’re recognizably part of the middle class. And there are other students who come from different backgrounds etc. And I think when you look at the margins -people who are really at the margins- for example, students who have experienced the type of displacement we’re talking about, you really understand something about the system. It’s occlusions, as well as exclusions, the things that they fail to see. It is the case that they fail to value it but more fundamentally, they fail to see, they fail to recognize different types of learning, different types of educational trajectories, which become almost imperceptible. And of course, there are moves in various universities to address this but there’s many studies, many reports, many accounts, many testimonies of students from the non-ideal background feeling marginalized, out of place in university.

Will Brehm  8:42
So, before we sort of turned to try and reimagine higher education from the vantage point of displaced students, so to speak, as you have been mentioning that the universities’ displacement sort of sits within a wider context. How would you describe that context? And what parts of this context matter to the conversation around universities today?

Ian Cook  9:06
I think I’ll start and then let Prem join in. I think the wider context is a big question, which I think we ask ourselves and I think everyone who works or studies in higher education should ask, what’s the point of a university? Like, really, what’s the point of a university? Why have we set up these systems? Where did they come from? And part of this is historical, and then part of it is also trying to understand these very sort of local-national contexts, but also the Pan European or global context as well. So, historically, to give, like, a very short version, universities, were places – I realize I’m talking to an expert here, Will. They were places of elite learning for small groups of men, right? This is what they were. And then slowly different groups were allowed in, you know, women were allowed in at some point. And then across many parts of Europe and the world, there was a massification of higher education in the 20th century. Lots more people started to go. In the UK, where you are based, Will, you know, Tony Blair had this, you know, thing, we’re going to have 50% of people in university and that became like a mantra. I think globally now, there’s about 35-36% of people get to go to university, whereas amongst refugee populations, it’s about 5%. Although the UNHCR has an aim now, they want to get 15% by 2030.  That’s like 15 by 30 is their sort of goal. But we can critique numbers. I listened to one of your podcasts a while back, maybe 2020 all about numbers, where you’re saying don’t get beholden by numbers. But the point there is, then suddenly it got very big.

And then also, then we have the whole sort of neoliberal turn of universities where it’s like, “Okay, now everyone’s in university, we need to get people paying for university”. Fees started to get introduced. I know in American context, fees have always been there. So, more and more people are now expected to pay to university and that means there’s a certain instrumentalization of higher education. I go to university to get myself a piece of paper that’s going to help me get to a certain place and put people on certain life trajectories. And when you have this sort of historical trend that we’ve reached the current point of now, plus, we have this question, where I think a lot of us feel that higher education is in a little bit of a crisis, shall we say, right now, where it’s like everyone seems to be under attack in different ways. You know, like, there’s too many people with PhDs trying to get jobs, there’s lots of university departments or universities themselves are under threat because of funding. There’s also lots of universities. like the university where we both work, the Central European University, but other universities as well, that are under threat from authoritarian regimes because they’re trying to shut down certain notions of academic freedom, then there’s also the freedom from the market, which is needed as well. And so, this is sort of like the big context within which then suddenly, we’re saying, “Okay, we think that universities should be opened up for people who are displaced”. And this makes it very difficult because everyone seems to be in a moment of total crisis, and you want to make it even more complicated. But we don’t think that’s necessarily a complication, we think it’s probably an opportunity.

It’s an opportunity for reimagining what the university is and could be. Do we want universities to be an assembly line for the markets? Do we want the universities to go back to being places of elite knowledge production? Do we want all of us who work in universities to all lose our jobs when we all move online and a few superstar academics teach their online courses, and then PhD students sit around and help undergraduates understand? All these questions, are there. Or can universities have a social mission? Can universities have, you know, the third mission of a university beyond teaching and research to be active players, to make the world a better place? Because we believe that education can be a really important thing to make the world a better place. Not only in individuals’ lives, but for society. People who have critical thinking skills, the sort of stuff that you learn when you get to university can affect change in society for better. It’s good for democracy, it’s good for just everyday life if we do this. So, I think like, in a sense, that’s how I see it -as an opportunity. Like what are universities going to do? Everyone says, now, like, not everybody, there’s a lot of talk around now, like the age of migration or of like big flows of refugees, and we’d problematize that language where it’s like dehumanizing language. But there are a lot of people who are displaced in the world right now. What are we -those of us who work in universities- going to do? And I think that’s a mission. That’s something there that we can actually think about on an everyday basis, and also reimagining what universities are going to be into the future.

Will Brehm  13:29
It’s quite interesting to think historically there, how dynamic the university has been and it changes over time. It’s not static or constant. And so, in a way that is hopeful. So, despite the crisis we might be in and all the different angles that you’ve outlined, there is this potential and this possibility to see and imagine and reimagine a university in a new way. So that is quite hopeful despite the sort of dire circumstances that exist. But Prem, I want to bring you in because another issue that seems to be at play here is something around the nation state, because universities seemed to historically been designed on a nation state basis, but yet people are moving, there’s the internationalization of higher education and people moving around the world to pay fees and get degrees and pieces of paper from all over the world. But also, this issue of sort of displaced people who have been moving across borders, willingly or not, and then trying to enter universities. It seems that the nation state also is a constraint here in some ways.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  14:35
I think it can be a constraint but you can also flip it the other way and see how the university actually can be at the vanguard of really creating an opportunity for a more global form of community. A more global form of a learning community. But I think that the issue comes more rather -picking up what Ian is saying- is that the university becomes increasingly cloistered. It becomes this space where it is a part of the nation state but it is fragmented and disconnected from certain other parts of the nation state. So, I think that the nation state works well when it’s in a hegemony by creating connections between certain institutions and pretending, imagining, cultivating disconnections with other institutions. So, I think we say this somewhere in the book, but opening up the university shouldn’t come only from within university. When we talk about opening up the university, we mean opening up a space of learning, a space of knowledge. This involves working with people, with groups, with organizations outside of the university whether these are informal education organizations, or whether they are migrant rights groups, or whether they are trade unions. So, I think it’s important that as we talk about opening up the university -as Ian says- we’re opening up education, opening up learning, questioning the restrictive purposes of learning so that people either become civil servants, or they’re prepared for market jobs, but rather rearticulate this project of learning with a wider framing of society. And this can be all sorts of things from global organizations, or globally minded organizations, or very local neighborhood organizations. And universities, increasingly, I think they’ve become cloistered. Where there are connections, there are connections to the market, there are connections to certain state institutions. And it creates this commonsensical view of a network of learning and employment that connects universities to big businesses or to the state, it provides civil servants and knowledge isn’t refreshed. Knowledge isn’t renewed because it’s not connecting in the same way, or in different ways to different types of groups. Groups outside of the university that represent marginalized groups who have something to say about what constitutes knowledge and learning, but this something is not perceptible. It’s not resonant in society.

Will Brehm  17:04
Is this what you would call disruptive education? In the book, that’s sort of one of the points that you emphasize, that we need to move towards this notion of disruptive education.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  17:14
I think so. I mean, Ian will also, I’m sure, have lots to add to this point. But I think the whole idea of disruptive education is to, first of all, have some sort of a sense of what it is that we are trying to disrupt. And for me, at least, the basic thing, what we’re trying to disrupt is a stasis, is a cloistered way of producing and reproducing knowledge that -as Ian wrote in his chapter- leads to academics being involved in academia for prestige. You know, the publications in certain types of journals, etc., etc. And how do we disrupt that? How do we break out of this cycle of producing a certain form of knowledge, of creating certain types of academic professionals who do a certain type of thing over and over again? And to disrupt that, partly, is to open up the university towards different groups of people, open up the university towards different types of organizations, different ways of thinking and seeing.

Ian Cook  18:07
And then, maybe it goes down into the classroom as well, right? So, like disruptive education in the classroom. That means thinking about the syllabi that we produce, so that they’re not just recycling themselves through the canon again, and again and again. But recognizing that, “Okay, if we’re going to have more diverse classrooms, we need more diverse readings, or educational stimuli. And we need to allow classrooms to be places where disruptive knowledge circulates. And where we can think together with students. Not in a hierarchical way.” Of course, there are always hierarchies there within a classroom but not always in a way of like, me, the professor, with all this knowledge puts it now into the students’ head, but rather thinking about it in a much more radically co-learning type of sense, you know? And that’s disruptive for us as teachers, right? Like, when you enter a classroom, sometimes it can be a bit scary if you don’t know where your class is going to go when you start.

Will Brehm  18:59
And so, in a sense, to go back to that initial example that you gave around a displaced student who might be seen as lacking, but actually has all of these amazing sorts of epistemologies and insight and knowledge. And so, disruptive education in the classroom might be embracing what that student has to offer without exactly knowing what that information is, or that knowledge or epistemology, and so that the teacher ends up learning in the process but the student isn’t seen as in deficit, let’s say.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  19:29
And to add to that, you know, I think it’s really important to acknowledge this. This project of opening up the university to opening up to different ways of seeing and knowing the world is or can be a discomforting experience. It’s not all about light and happiness. It’s about thinking about and responding to ways of seeing and knowing the world which can be discomforting. And how do you sit with something that’s discomforting? Something that can often break or question our worldviews, our ways of seeing things, and our interest.

Will Brehm  20:01
It’s like giving up control as well. So, we have to be okay not being in control. And that I think probably is quite hard for teachers and professors.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  20:10
You can’t prepare for it. My experience is, you can’t. We can talk about it, we can imagine but when it actually happens it’s like -I won’t swear on your podcast, but you know it is…

Ian Cook  20:19
But I would just say that at the same time, just so we don’t sound naive, which I don’t think neither of us are. And I think all the different chapters in the book point out the difficulties that are faced, sometimes that means thinking about what university programs can do to make sure that students who are displaced, who come into the university, so that they can flourish. So, they can do really well there. And so, for a lot of students, it does mean things like language training, or digital skills training, and it’s always this balance between, do we want to be involved in sort of a mainstreaming process, or do we want to accept the radical difference that comes into the university? And what does the student want within that? Because of course we can talk, as Prem said, it is easy to talk about, but when you actually sit down and speak with students who are from many different parts of the world, find themselves in different new countries trying to remake their life as best as possible, Sometimes, they really do want to use a degree in a very instrumental way. And that’s totally fine. You know, that’s totally., it’s like of course! You need to get that piece of paper so that you can go get on with your life and do these things. And that’s also really important as well. So, it’s recognizing this balance and working through and saying, “Okay, we respect what people are bringing, and work with, and through that but at the same time, make sure that the students who are coming from different parts of the world forcibly displaced and end up in a university, they can really make the most of that opportunity to do as much as they can with their life afterwards.

Will Brehm  21:50
Or what could change at the sort of institutional level to allow for universities to open up?

Ian Cook  21:57
On an institutional level, maybe we can make a list. An obvious one is cost of education, I think. Certain countries recognize that people who are displaced don’t have access to resources that local students might. But even then, local students might not. Some countries, like the one we’re living in, Hungary, they just treat students who are officially refugees, as if they were Hungarian students in the sense that they have to either go into Hungarian language program, which Hungarian is a very difficult language to learn to study, or they go to an English Language Program, which is very expensive. And they’re actually barred from applying for grants that international students would be allowed to apply for, because they say, “Oh, you’re a refugee. That means you should be counted as Hungarian”. So, it’s recognizing the particular things. It’s also thinking about -and I think this is actually good for the whole of the university- recognizing that people often come to universities with very complex lives, and how this can be accommodated for institutionally. This may be like, you know, a lot of students come with trauma. Trauma shows itself in very strange ways. Sometimes as teachers and also as people who organize programs, it’s difficult to deal with because trauma can be like just a student standing up and walking out of a class five times during a class. Trauma can be the home country where the student comes from is going through a very difficult time.

Like I noticed, I was talking to a student originally from Syria, who was saying he remembers, during his time when he did a master’s, his hometown then was on the frontline of the war. And he just couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t read. But what do you do when you have a program which is designed to be over very fast? You know, because this is higher education now. Let’s get people in, in September, out in summer for a master’s or in three years, or, you know, PhD in the UK, what’s it like three and a half years, and you’re finished, like, get out, you know. And then what happens if you have a two-month gap in the middle of that, when your whole life is collapsing? How do we account for this? And this doesn’t only affect students who are displaced, this can affect people in different ways as well. So, it’s recognizing what people bring in as well. And this also may be bureaucratic things. We talked about, at the very beginning, the paperwork thing about recognizing paperwork, but it can also then be a bit broader like recognizing different ways of assessing whether students should be going into a program or not. Or questioning the whole idea of assessment at that sort of level, or whether universities are actually places for learning rather than assessing prior knowledge and so on. So, there’s a bunch of stuff, but I’ll let Prem jump in, maybe he has more.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  24:19
Maybe I’ll just add two things. I think in many universities across the world, there has been a tendency to adopt planning and strategizing, which come from largely the world of -you can call it what you want whether it’s neoliberalism, or economics, or capitalism or something like that. It has many things but a lot of it is centering on creating structures that enhance predictability. So, you get someone in at a certain time, you do X and Y to them, and you expect the outcomes Z, which is fine, it can work. But as Ian says, you know, students are diverse and some have experienced trauma, some of them have all sorts of stuff going on their lives. And I think as a university institution, the biggest thing we can do is to step away from this type of planning, this type of institutionalizing a certain way of seeing how institutions should work and the people in them. We need to plan in a way that accounts for the mistakes that we will make as we plan, and we need to account for the stuff that students are going through, for the mistakes students will experience. That’s crucial. It’s a fundamental thing that’s really hard for me at least, to explain or explain how it has become so hegemonic and so dominant. This is cultural planning. I mean, our university, where Ian and I teach, is going through this right now. A certain way of planning to streamline. You know these words -from streamline to centralized. All of these buzzwords from what Tony Blair started. And then the other thing much more simply, but also not simply is really, the institution ethos can do so much if they step away from this type of streamlining benchmarking when it comes to admissions as well. I think one of the points Ian was saying is that students have these multiple forms of knowledge which are lost in the benchmarks. They are lost in the checkboxes; have you done this? No, you haven’t done this. But is there a way of admitting students that moves away from assessing whatever it may be, a student who struggles in the Hungarian system to pass the Hungarian equivalent of a levels, but because they’re suddenly placed in a Hungarian language school, whose knowledge isn’t well assessed through the examination system, is there another way we can do this? So, a lot of it for me is moving away from creating predictability, creating benchmarks and to embrace accidents, to embrace insecurity to try and let diversity resonate in university.

Ian Cook  26:47
And maybe this always goes down also to the way that we assess students in courses in the classes as well. I was talking to a student who is originally from Afghanistan, and he was talking about how he’s in a liberal arts program now in Germany. And he was telling me that he sits there in the class, and he has things that he thinks that he can understand and contribute to in a way that some of his -how did he put that? I don’t want to make him sound bad, but he said, “I think I know more than my fellow students. I think I can articulate it better, but I just can’t write in the way that’s expected of me by the professors. And so how do I overcome this? Because this is what I’m graded on at the end, right? I’m graded on whether or not I can articulate myself. And it’s often vaguely defined way, that we know what a good essay is, we know what a good writer is and it’s like, well, you know, somebody’s had to learn a new language as a teenager, go through a higher education system, get grants, and so on, and so forth. And then, you know, not do super well because they haven’t quite got what we could problematically call the language sophistication needed to write an essay in philosophy. And so, it’s about thinking about assessment as well, I think, and what we are assessing as teachers as well.

Will Brehm  28:01
I’m clapping for that because even someone who doesn’t struggle with the language, I feel constrained by the rules of assessment in my university. And it’s very hard to try and do something new and you get constrained and it’s frustrating from even the teacher’s end. And I know, it’s frustrating from the students’ end who feel why – it’s sort of the race to the bottom where the easiest form of assessment is, give one essay at the end of the term. And it’s 100% of the grade because it’ll get through validation. And, you know, it just becomes the easiest thing. And every teacher I talk to, we know, intrinsically that that is a terrible thing to do. But it just so happens that so many modules and courses sort of rely on. I wish we can break out of that mold. The other part that I was applauding when I was reading your book, was where you have this call to basically defund management. And I was clapping in my head. And I was so happy to see that. But maybe you can explain why you think it’s valuable that we need to reduce the costs that universities spend on management at this point.

Ian Cook  29:14
We can think about it also in just very simple terms. Like, I know how much the program that I’m the Director of Studies for costs, right? Like I know how many students we can afford to take each year, like in this open access education program for displaced people in Hungary, which is a really hostile place to run a refugee education program because we have a horribly racist government. I know how much that costs. I know how much, also, a senior manager is paid at the university where I work. And I know I can run an entire program for less than what they’re paid, and it pisses me off. Like it really pisses me off because I’m just like, when did we let the priorities of a university become this? And this is a small university which is meant to have a mission, right? And other universities, especially when they’re getting state funding to some degree, which we don’t -like, you know, in the UK, we get insane wages there. Insane wages. And I’m just like when did we allow these people to keep giving themselves pay raises? And we were chatting a bit before we started the recording about the sort of general state or maybe it was on the recording, I can’t remember now, sort of the general state of higher education and what’s going on. And like, these people aren’t doing particularly good jobs. Lots of universities are running deficits, lots of universities are struggling to adapt to changing demands of students when it comes to what they want to learn -loads of issues. And yet we keep paying them more and more money. It’s just like, let’s maybe engage in a bit of transparent, open budgeting, when we can decide what the priorities are inside the university.

Do we need to keep making more and more positions that never used to exist? Like jobs that used to be done maybe for like, a couple of years by an academic, and then they would go back to their academic life, have now become hyper-specialized jobs that we have to pay people lots and lots of money for. And I’m just wondering why? That sort of anger came from. Because if you’re going to run a program for people who have experienced displacement for some time, it just costs money, right? So, we both work within the same unit at the university built in quite different programs. So, like an informal education program is relatively cheap, but like one if we’re going to take students who maybe need to do, like, a one-year prep program, that’s more expensive. That costs real money. Students need to have a scholarship for that one year, so they don’t have to work. We need to have small groups so the students can basically get the educational skills needed to make a competitive application to full time education. This is expensive. But then also like, how expensive is it versus senior management? So, it’s like really having an honest conversation about what we want to spend our money on.

Prem Kumar Rajaram  31:53
I’ll just emphasize what Ian said -it’s inefficient. I don’t think it’s ever been proven if you pay someone more to do a job and to create a job that actually makes them better at the job. It does not. It often leads to people trying to justify their salaries to the people giving the salaries. We also talked earlier about how boards of trustees in many universities have been taken over by a certain class of people who expect a certain type of demonstration of leadership. And this is not, to the best interests of education and learning always. It might be, it can be, but it’s not. But then the other thing that then happens is, when we’re talking about defunding the management, we’re not just talking about taking away salaries, we’re talking about defunding what are often pet projects of management. And I think a lot of universities -certainly in the United States, I think to an extent in Europe- have spent an insane amount of money on real estate, on capital investments. And this becomes almost an end in itself. And why? At the same time, tuition fees are getting higher and higher. It doesn’t make sense. Money defines our imagination. How we define money and how we use money defines our imagination about anything, certainly with education. Having money in the hands of a management who has a certain amount of power, who has interests in justifying themselves to another group of people means certain things are impossible. For example, something very simple, like participatory budget making. Budgets for university should not be defined by administrative class or managerial class but by students, faculty, administration together, figuring out what this participation is and figuring out where money should go, how it should be defined. Is it a resource that is scarce? Is it a resource to be held? Is it a resource to be distributed? And we don’t need an expert class telling us what to do in these cases. We’re sounding quite anarchic, aren’t we?

Will Brehm  33:47
Well, Ian Cook, Prem Kumar Rajaram, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Really a pleasure to talk today. And congratulations again on your book.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Guest Projects/Publications

Open Learning Initiative (OLIve)

Opening Up the University: Teaching and Learning with Refugees
Refugee and Migrant Knowledge as Historical Narratives
Academia Under Attack 

Providing Access to Higher Education for Refugees in Europe

Mentioned Resources

UNHCR 15by30 Roadmap
UNHCR 15by30 Action Plan

Recommended Resources

Higher Education for Forcibly Displaced Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Research on Refugees’ Pathways to Higher Education since 2010
Refugee Education
Higher Education in the Context of Mass Displacement
Neoliberalism and the crisis in higher education
Refugees and Higher Education: Perspectives on Access, Equity, and Internationalization

Higher Education for Refugees: A Need for Intersectional Research

Access for Refugees into Higher Education: A Review of Interventions in North America and Europe 

Navigating University Spaces as Refugees

The Higher Education Paradox for Resettled Refugees in the USA

Other Resources

Higher Education Scholarships for Refugees

Refugee Education Initiative

Universities of Sanctuary

Higher Ed Immigration Portal

Refugee and Migrant Education Network

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