Open Space: The Big Issues Around Refugees Today

START

October 20, 2022

1:00 pm

BST (UTC/GMT+1)

END

October 20, 2022 2:00 pm

BST (UTC/GMT+1)

Event Type

Zoom

Check your time zone

Recording

Event Categories

Community Groups, Individuals, Organisations, Other, Schools, Valuesthon 2022

On 20th October from 13.00 to 14.00 BST (UTC/GMT+1) As the number of displaced people around the world hits record levels, join this interactive discussion as we explore the difficult issues involved.

It’s a global crisis that’s growing and growing. At the end of last year almost 90 million people around the world had been forced to flee their homes, and this year the number has swollen to over 100 million as a result of the Ukraine war and crises in Myanmar and Burkina Faso (UNHCR figures). Many other major displacements of people are happening in almost every part of world. It is one of the biggest, most heart-breaking and most intractable problems facing us all as a global community.

What exactly is driving this burgeoning crisis? Why do refugees have to wait on average 20 years to be resettled? Has the world run out of compassion?

In this interactive event, a range of speakers will address this major global issue from different perspectives including the point of view of the refugees themselves. In the second part of our session we will open up the discussion to the other attendees to offer their perspective.

Organised by World Speech Day in collaboration with World Values Day.

There are two separate sessions of this event to choose from: this one or a later one at 21.00 BST (UTC/GMT+1.

Register here for this free event.

You can also join a livestream of this event on any of these channels:

On YouTube at: https://youtube.com/c/worldspeechdaylive;

On Facebook at: facebook.com/worldspeechday

On LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/in/simongibsonwriter

Speakers

**Dr. Catherine Maternowska**
Catherine is Professor of Violence Prevention for Young People and co-director of the End Violence Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Author of many books and articles, she brings three decades of field-based research and programming spanning the Americas, Africa and Asia focusing on violence prevention and response, gender equity, and sexual and reproductive health. From 2012-2017, she worked for UNICEF–Office of Research-Innocenti leading the Multi-Country Study on the Drivers of Violence. She has PhD from Columbia University, MPH from the University of Michigan and BSc (Econ) from the London School of Economics.

**Professor Vincent Intondi**
Vincent is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Race, Justice, and Civic Engagement at Montgomery College in Maryland. From 2009-2017 he was Director of Research for American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute in Washington, DC. His research focuses on the intersection of race and nuclear weapons. He is the author of African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement, and Saving the World from Nuclear War: The June 12, 1982 Disarmament Rally and Beyond. Email: vincent.intondi@montgomerycollege.edu Twitter: @VincentIntondi Website: www.vincentintondi.com

**Mariacristina Molfetta**
Mariacristina is a Cultural Anthropologist who worked from 1992 – 2008 in international cooperation for the protection of human rights. She lived and worked in refugee camps in the Balkans, in Central America, in tribal areas of Pakistan, in Iraqi Kurdistan and in Darfur in Sudan. She is presently the contact person for the international protection and asylum rights in the area of research and documentation of Fondazione Migrantes and the permanent Observatory for refugees, Vie di Fuga. She has been a spokesperson for Fondazione Migrantes and the Report on International Protection in Italy from 2014-2018. She has been curator of The Rights of Asylum Report from 2017 – 2021.

**Farah Syed Abul**
Farah is involved in Community Based Protection at 9 Camps in Bangladesh for Rohingya Refugees as Project Coordinator for ActionAid Bangladesh. He has a Master in Education from Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology (AUST) and Diploma in Disaster Management from Patuakhali Science and Technology University (PSTU). He has also worked for DIAKONIA Bangladesh, South Asia Partnership Bangladesh, PRISM Bangladesh, Local Initiative For Development – LIFD and in Organization for Mothers and Infants (OMI).

**Mohammed Hassan**
Mohammed is Ambassador for StepUp.One and was a Co-Chair, World Economic Forum, Davos in 2019. He was a formerly Zonal Chairman at Keny’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. Born in Somalia he was confined there for more than twenty years with no passport, no birth certificate, no opportunities, no hope. In a broadcast from Kakuma to the World Economic Forum Annual Summit at Davos, he called for a reframing of global conceptions of displaced peoples: ‘It’s high time that refugees are seen as partners in development efforts, rather than a burden to society. We have people with talents who, given a chance, can perform.” This brief intervention inspired the 2019 formation of StepUp.One, an organisation dedicated to re-skilling people living in refugee camps and connecting them to opportunities that pay.

**Kathryn Mahony**
Fierce refugee rights advocate with more than fifteen years experience in international humanitarian, human rights and development work. For nearly five years she has been Global Spokesperson for UNHCR, the world’s lead refugee agency, which provides protection to more than 100 million people forced from home and representing more than 17,000 dedicated staff.

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