2014•07•04     Maastricht

Considering the importance of higher education for refugee development and research, doctoral research is being carried out at UNU-MERIT on how tertiary education impacts forced migration processes. This research is multi-sited and will be conducted in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa based on these countries’ different refugee hosting policies, proximities to conflict, and differentiated tertiary education sectors. Fieldwork should begin in early 2015.

The research hopes to reveal different displacement patterns and refugees’ deliberative decision-making. By looking at tertiary education, it also seeks to understand the fuller scope of refugee agency, different types of agency, and the ability of agency to change over the course of refugees’ movements. Lastly, it aims to uncover explanatory mechanisms of how features of agency related to higher education interact with structural constraints related to conflict, geography, or socio-economic crisis.

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Photo Credits:UN Photo/IRIN\