Grand Challenges Lecture - 8 February


Posted on 31 January 2017

Grand Challenges Lecture Series

8 February 2017 | 1.30 - 2.30pm | Keele Hall - The Salvin Room

The Grand Challenges lecture series is delighted to welcome its next speaker to Keele University, Professor Alison Phipps. 

The Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS) Grand Challenges Lecture series explores complex questions which confront local, national, regional and global communities. These grand challenges will require creative and innovative interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration to suggest and predict possible resolutions.

About the lecture

In this talk, Professor Alison Phipps will look at the question of what we can learn from the lives of refugees through the lens of the arts and of language. She will offer examples from Ghana, Gaza and Calais as well as from the practice of her own personal commitment to a household of refuge. In so doing she will make connections to arts and philosophy out of which the Refugee Convention was born after the Second World War. Her work will elaborate research undertaken as part of the AHRC Translating Cultures programme and also through the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts.
Using image, poetry and dance this talk will engage intellect and affect in order to respond to and offer a grand challenge.

The present political crisis over refugees, race and language in Europe, Australia and the U.S. has sharpened the focus on the philosophical question of what it means to exist as a refugee, and what it means to give and receive refuge. It is one of the grand challenges of the day in these contexts and yet in other areas of the world the practice of refugee integration and hospitality is a far less crisis-driven and ordinary affair. At the heart of these questions of refuge, which have been asked acutely at other times in history, is the question of sufficiency – a dance between a myth of scarcity and a practice of abundance.

About Professor Alison Phipps

Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies, and Co-Convener of Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNET). From 1st January 2016 she takes up the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Waikato University, Aotearoa New Zealand, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia and Principal Investigator for the £2 million AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state.’

In 2011 she was voted ‘Best College Teacher’ by the student body and received the Universities ‘Teaching Excellence Award’ for a Career Distinguished by Excellence. In 2012 she received an OBE for Services to Education and Intercultural and Interreligious Relations in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

She has undertaken work in, amongst others, Palestine, Sudan, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France, USA, Portugal, Ghana. She has produced and directed theatre and worked as dramaturg and creative liturgist with the World Council of Churches from 2008-2011 for the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation. Most recently she co-directed Broken World, Broken Word, a Noyam African Dance Institute, Dodowa, Ghana with Tawona Sithole & Gameli Tordzro.
She is regularly advises public, governmental and third sector bodies on migration and languages policy and designed and lead at witness-bearing visit to Calais for Scottish Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee.

She is author of numerous books and articles and a regular international keynote speaker and broadcaster and Member of the Iona Community. Her first collection of poetry, Through Wood was published in 2009.

Refreshments will be available in the Great Hall, adjacent to the Salvin Room on the day of the lecture from 12.30pm onwards.

This lecture is free and all are welcome to attend.