Emerging Scholars Network Workshop

The Kaldor Centre’s Emerging Scholars Network held its Annual Workshop on Thursday Nov 17, the day before the centre’s flagship annual conference. 

Led by Dr Claire Higgins, the Network is an interdisciplinary community that enables the next generation of scholars studying forced migration to connect with and learn from one another’s expertise. Almost 80 masters, doctoral candidates and post-doctoral researchers are members of the Network, hailing from 25 institutions across Australia, North America and Europe. 

The Annual Workshop allowed Network members to present their research in a supportive environment and ‘workshop’ their ideas with peers and senior academics. Thanks to funding received from the Law Faculty we were able to host 38 participants and hear papers from 19 speakers across two parallel sessions. Each speaker received feedback from two discussants that were chosen for their expertise in complementary research areas. This format ensured that speakers received thoughtful and substantive feedback on their work, and sparked new conversations and new friendships throughout the day. As one attendee described to us afterwards, the workshop ‘was characterised by a generous spirit of collaboration, exchange and high quality work’ – exactly the atmosphere that we had hoped to create. 

Network members presented research across twelve disciplines and sub-disciplines, tackling the big unanswered questions in their fields; this included Australian migration policy (‘A critical reading of the Asylum Seeker Code of Conduct’), human security (‘The 2016 New York Declaration’), maritime law (‘The Refugee Clause in Commercial Shipping Contracts’), and psychology (‘The wellbeing of young Hazara refugees in Australia’) among many other fascinating topics. The Kaldor Centre’s own PhD candidates presented their cutting-edge research in refugee law, interpreting the OAU Convention (Tamara Wood) and access to courts under Art 16 of the Refugee Convention (Emma Dunlop), and analysing refugee protection through labour mobility (Khanh Hoang) and external processing in the EU (Riona Moodley). 

The next Annual Workshop will be held on 23 November 2017. Early career scholars who wish to join the Network and get involved in events next year are asked to email: kaldor-emergingscholars-owner@lists.unsw.edu.au with a short summary of their qualifications and current research activities in this field.

Profiles of Emerging Scholars Network Members can be found here.