Oral History and Collective Memory: Documenting Refugee Voices and the Challenges of Archival Representation

This paper will explore the concept of preserving refugee rights in the records that we keep, and will explore how we have undertaken civic engagement and outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers in London and beyond to explore ways of documenting their stories through the us of bottom-up oral history methodologies and the use of objectives and textiles as a means of preserving collective memories and a new modes of representation beyond the traditional written word. It will also consider the role of ethics and the role of archives in documenting under-represented communities. The Refugee Council Archive at UEL is a growing collection of archival materials documenting the refugee experience. This paper will reflect on our work exploring the very nature of what we mean by the concept of an “archive,” and explore the challenges of bottom-up methodological approaches for helping to preserve the collective memory of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers in way that enables their voices to be heard in a positive way and is documentation along the best methodology to achieve this

The Seventieth Anniversary of the Refugee Council: Voluntary Action, Living Archives and Refugee Voices

This issue of Displaced Voices, published during Refugee Week, reflects on the 70th anniversary of both the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the establishment of the third sector organisations that were to become the Refugee Council. Our theme for this issue was: Twentieth Century Histories of Civic Society Responses to Crises of Displacement. Throughout these seven decades, the issues of refuge and displacement, and the challenges faced by those undertaking the migration journey, have continued to require an engaged response from third sector organisations, often filling the void left by the relative inaction of national governments. This article considers the key narratives located within this issue, whilst also exploring our role as the host archival repository of the Refugee Council. The anniversary is an opportunity to reflect on our work undertaking anti-oppressive, participatory and collaborative methods working directly with refugees, community groups and third-sector organisations

Supplemental: BPS Guidelines for Psychologists Working with Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK

These guidelines were developed by the British Psychological Society’s Presidential Taskforce on Refugees and Asylum Seekers. As a discipline and a profession, psychology has a wealth of knowledge, experience and talent to apply in this area to help improve the lives of refugees and asylum seekers who have fled their countries and are seeking safety. This guidance document is important, not only for frontline psychologists and others working in the field, but also for practitioners in related disciplines, including directors, managers and practitioners of organisations working with refugees and migrants, providing services to this population at home and abroad

Determinism and inevitability

In Freedom Evolves, Dan Dennett embarks on his second book-length attempt to lay to rest the deep metaphysical concerns that many philosophers have expressed about the possibility of human freedom.One of his main objectives in the earlier chapters of the book is to make determinism appear less threatening to our prospects for free agency than it has sometimes seemed, by attempting to show that a deterministic universe would not necessarily be a universe of which it could truly be said that everything that occurs in it is inevitable. In this paper, I want to consider Dennett’s striking argument for this conclusion in some detail. I shall begin by suggesting that on its most natural interpretation, the argument is vulnerable to a serious objection. I shall then develop a second interpretation which is more promising than the first, but will argue that without placing more weight on etymological considerations than they can really bear, it can deliver, at best, only a significantly qualified version of the conclusion that Dennett is seeking. However, although I shall be arguing that his central argument fails, it is also part of the purpose of this paper to build on what I regard as some rather insightful and suggestive material which is developed by Dennett in the course of elaborating his views. His own development of these ideas is hampered, so I shall argue, by a framework for thinking about possibility that is too crude to accommodate the immense subtlety and complexity which is exhibited by the workings of the modal verb ‘can’ and its past tense form, ‘could’; and also, I believe, by the mistaken conviction, on Dennett’s part, that any naturalistically respectable solution to the problem of free will would have to be of a compatibilist stripe. I shall attempt, in the second half of the paper, to explain what seems to me to be wrong with the framework, and to make some points about the functioning of ‘can’ and ‘could’, which I believe any adequate replacement for Dennett’s framework must respect. Ironically, though, I shall argue that it is the rejection of Dennett’s own framework which holds the key to understanding how to defend the spirit (if not the letter) of his thoughts about the invulnerability of our ordinary modal thinking to alleged threats from determinism