Alison Phipps (refugee researcher)

Alison Phipps OBE FRSE FRSA FAcSS a University of Glasgow professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies and holds the first UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts.[1][2] She has been awarded the Minerva Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society[3] and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,[2] and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.[4]

This article is about the professor of refugee research, language and intercultural studies. For the sociologist and feminist, see Alison Phipps (sociologist).

Alison Phipps

OBE, FRSE, FRSA, FAcSS
EducationPhD in German and Cultural Studies University of Manchester
Occupation(s)First UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts
EmployerThe University of Glasgow
Known forresearch into global refugees, asylum and migration, and using inter-cultural language and arts, influencing government policy and helping individual migrants

She is co-director of the £25 million Global Challenge Research Fund programme with Professor Heaven Crawley, Coventry University, and two professors in Ghana and Haiti, looking at arts and language in the global South, because, in her words, that is where 85% of migration occurs.[3]

Alison Phipps is a member of the Iona Community.[2]

Career

Phipps' specialisms are wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary, covering refugees, asylum and migration, educating in the social sciences, multilingualism and tourism and communications for peace, while maintaining a broader interests in language learning and teaching, faith studies and ethnography. She works internationally and within the UK advising on policy and strategy.. She has also published two poetry collections.[2] She admits to being critical of the UK government's policy on migration (2021).[3]

Phipps chaired the New Scots Core Group for Refugee Integration with the Scottish Government, COSLA and the Scottish Refugee Council, for whom she acts as an Ambassador.[1] Phipps serves on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenge Research Fund Advisory Board.[2] She was given the Order of the British Empire (2012) for services to education, intercultural and interreligious relations and elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2015).[5] Phipps has worked (2008 - 2011) for the International Council of Churches International Ecumenical Peace Convocation, and chaired (1999 -2004) the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC). She has participated and led a number of advisory bodies such as Red Cross, or Church of Scotland, to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Ethiopia and the Higher Education Committee for developing Refugee Guidance for Universities Scotland. In 2015, she led a 5-day fact-finding group of UK Parliament Home Affairs and Justice Select Committee to refugee camps in Dunkirk and Calais, France.[2]

Education and early career

Phipps spent her childhood and youth in Norton, Sheffield. She has remarked that her high school had a number of suicides, and she found solace in the Church and studying languages. Her grandparents had taken in refugees from Eastern Europe, and she herself has fostered a girl from Eritirea.[3]

Her doctorate was in German and Cultural Studies, an ethnographic study of Naturtheater in a region of south-west Germany, completed in 1995.[5]

Having been a lecturer at the University of Glasgow since 1995, originally in the Department of German Studies, she subsequently moved to take up a Chair in the university's School of Education.

Subsequent career and professional honours

She was a senior policy advisor to the British Council (2007 - 2014) and, in 2011, was voted 'Best College Teacher' by the students at Glasgow University and won the Universities 'Teaching Excellence Award'. She was the first Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Waikato (2013) and adjunct professor of Hospitality and Tourism at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2017) and (2016) 'Thinker in Residence" at the EU Hawke Centre at the University of South Australia.[2]

Recent research and leadership roles

As Principal Investigator in the £2m AHRC international research project 'Researching Multilingually at Borders of the Body, Language, Law and the State,' [6] Phipps involved speakers of 15 languages, global dramatists and key research teams during what was called 'the refugee crisis' during 2014 - 2017. Phipps was Executive Producer for a resultant televised drama for National Ghana TV with local indigenous and displaced people as actors in 2016, and repeating this work with the support professional mental health advisors in 2017, called Broken World, Broken Word.[7] She produced and directed other media resulting from this research, and ran 'summer schools' in Ghana.[2]

She has been convenor of the Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET) which is a multi-agency international research and practice organisation working with policy makers and Third Sector and individuals covering the impacts causing migration (including climate change) and impacts and mitigations as a result.[8]

Chairing the New Scots Core Group for Refugee Integration with the Scottish Government, COSLA and the Scottish Refugee Council involved Phipps in ensuring wide consultation on building strategy and practical advice. And her work with the International Council of Churches was through creative liturgy. She has used drama and inter-cultural methods including observation and engagement with diverse people in research programmes in the US, Europe, Australasia, the Caribbean and Africa.[2]

In 2015, she was profiled in The Guardian explaining that she had lived with refugees as guests in her home, and volunteered at Dungavel detention centre and though these experiences did not solve the 'migration crisis', and is quoted as saying

'..hosting refugees in family homes is one answer to the lack of compassion and the desperate struggle for practical resources in the sector. The experience of sharing makes you far more acutely attuned to the needs of human beings and their suffering; it can develop empathy but most of all it changes us through relationships.'[9]

In 2021, following the damage of the Scottish Crannog Centre, in a fire,[10] Phipps and UNESCO Chair artist in residence Tawona Sitole wrote of the tears of the 'improvisors, working out how their forebears might have made shelters, might have lived' and the healing properties of working together to re-create their past, in weaving together Soay sheep wool - without language yet a 'thousand touches and a thousand voices'. Sitole travelled 8000.1 miles from Waterfalls, Harare, Zimbabwe to come there, but relates to a similarity of life in ancient Scotland with African ancestral lives which will 'create a deeper connection' globally and offer 'potent ways of healing'.[11]

Public events and statements

Phipps took part in the RSE 'Curious' 2021 programme[12] of public online events under the broad title of 'insights from some of the world's leading experts on health and well-being, innovation and invention, our planet and COVID-19', for which she co-hosted a discussion on changing the UK's asylum system; her image appeared in the National newspaper's 'Picture of the day' with the "Curious" logo .[13] In the same paper in 2021, Phipps described the UK immigration reform as 'unjust' and likely to lead to deaths of would-be asylum seekers. She was quoted as saying that if passed the new laws would lead to 'future legal challenges', 'risked taking the UK out of the Refugee Convention' and 'undermine the work of the New Scots Integration Policy, which has a primary principle the integration of those seeking asylum from day one, and which is internationally acclaimed'.[14]

She was one of the academics who resigned in March 2021 in protest[15] from the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council international development panel at the cutting of Uk government research funding for 900 projects.[16] Phipps was also highly critical of the UK's 'evil' immigration policy after 27 refugees died attempting to cross the English Channel in an unsuitable boat in November 2021.[17]

Publications

She has 128 academic publications and media outputs in 2021.[18]

She is a frequent contributor to the Scottish newspaper "the National".[19]

Poetry

Phipps published her first poetry collection Through Wood in 2009 and another, The Warriors Who Do Not Fight, a collaboration with Tawona Sitole, in 2018.[20]

Editorships

She co-edits Tourism and Cultural Change journal and books, Languages, Intercultural Communication and Education and is on the editorial board of Language and Intercultural Communication, Critical Multilingualism Studies, and Hospitality and Society.[8]

References
  1. "Alison Phipps". Scottish Refugee Council. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  2. "University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Education - Our staff - Professor Alison Phipps". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  3. "Interview: Alison Phipps academic, linguist, artist". www.churchtimes.co.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  4. "Forty-seven leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences". Academy of Social Sciences. March 2017. Archived from the original on 16 October 2018. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  5. "Prof. Alison Phipps - AcademiaNet". www.academia-net.org. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  6. "AHRC Researching Multilingually at Borders". researching-multilingually-at-borders.com. 2018. Archived from the original on 5 August 2014. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  7. Tordzro, Gameli (4 December 2017), Broken World Broken Word Documentary FILM 2017, retrieved 30 July 2021
  8. "University of Glasgow - Research - Research units A-Z - Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network - About us". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  9. "Opening my home to refugees has been humbling and eye-opening | Alison Phipps". The Guardian. 8 September 2015. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  10. "'Simply awful': Recreated Iron Age roundhouse gutted by fire overnight". The National. 12 June 2021. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  11. Phipps, Alison; Sithole, Tawone (22 August 2021). "This is the vision of the new Crannog. A thoughand touches and a thousand voices. Our work here is just beginning, we hope". The Sunday National. Retrieved 22 August 2021.
  12. "Curious | 09–27 August". The Royal Society of Edinburgh. 13 July 2021. Retrieved 9 August 2021.
  13. "Picture of the Day". The National. 9 August 2021. p. 25.
  14. Phipps, Alison (12 September 2021). "Alison Phipps: What can we Scots do about this unbelievably cruel Borders Bill?". The National. Archived from the original on 12 September 2021. Retrieved 27 September 2021.
  15. Grove, Jack (16 March 2021). "Advisers quit over 'draconian' cuts to overseas research funding". Times Higher Education (THE). Archived from the original on 23 March 2021. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  16. Fazackerley, Anna (19 March 2021). "'This happens in Brazil, not Britain': academics in despair as global research funds pulled". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 19 March 2021. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  17. Yohannes, Hiyab; Phipps, Alison; O'Neill, Graham (21 November 2021). "'The asylum system is evil ... nobody cares about you': Harnet's 16 years of living hell". The National. Archived from the original on 21 November 2021. Retrieved 29 November 2021.
  18. "University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Education - Our staff - Professor Alison Phipps". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  19. "Search Results for "Alison Phipps"". The National. Retrieved 21 March 2022.
  20. Phipps, Alison M. (2018). The warriors who do not fight. Tawona Sithole. Glasgow, UK. ISBN 978-1-84952-600-5. OCLC 1039630376.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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