Allegra Lab

On this episode of Displacing Universities Monica and Ian speak with Ester Gallo, an Associate Professor at the University of Trento.

On this Episode of Displacing Universities Svitalna and Ian speak with Mariana Knaurd, Secretary General of the Global University Academy.

On this Episode of Displacing Universities Ian speaks with Louis Henri Seukwa and Janina Hertel who both work at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences or HAW. Louis Henri is Professor of Educational Sciences, Head of the Centre for Migration Research and Integration Practice and Representative of the Executive Board for Migration-Related University Development. Meanwhile Janina Educational manager at the Centre for Migration Research and Integration Practice.

In this final episode, the conversation turns to advocacy - what it means to do it from within a country shaped by donor dependency, short-term project cycles, and the structural inequalities discussed in the previous episode. Drawing on seven years of experience, participants reflect critically on why most funding for migration-related civil society work comes from European organizations whose primary interest is keeping people from reaching Europe, and what gets lost when programs arrive already designed, with local actors reduced to implementers. The episode questions whether sensitization campaigns can ever meaningfully address migration as long as the conditions driving it remain untouched, and confronts the mounting human toll of deportations - particularly from Germany -on individuals, families, and communities left with no psychological support and no material safety net. It closes not with easy answers but with a collective demand: for self-determination over aid dependency, for long-term structural investment over project cycles, and for an honest reckoning with who benefits from the current system, and who pays for it.

In this episode, the conversation turns to the structural conditions that make the backway feel like the only viable option for so many Gambians. Moving from the individual to the systemic, the episode examines how unemployment, an inherited colonial education system that teaches in English and ignores local knowledge, nepotism in the job market, and the extractive exploitation of Gambian resources - from fishing deals with the EU and China to pharmaceutical dumping - reproduce poverty and dependency across generations. The episode argues that these are not incidental failures but the ongoing effects of colonial and neocolonial dynamics that continue to shape everyday life in The Gambia, and that any honest conversation about the so-called root causes of migration must start there.

In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian speaks with Elisabeth Boston. Elisabeth is the Refugee policy officer at UCLouvain in Belgium. They speak about Access2University (A2U), a programme that aims to prepare refugees (applicants) with little or no knowledge of French to resume university studies, and Education Pathways, which is an initiative to bring displaced people to Belgium to study.

In this episode, YAIM members describe how they kept their sanity inside Tariq al Sikka through music, shared prayers, and solidarity across nationalities, before recounting what happened once they were repatriated to The Gambia through what IOM calls Assisted Voluntary Return. It traces the gap between what they were promised and what they actually received, and follows their attempts to build a livelihood with a reintegration package of roughly 1,000 euros designed around a neoliberal entrepreneurship model that ignores both the psychological toll of the journey and the collective, family-based economy of Gambian society, and the infrastructural limitations of the country.

In this episode, YAIM members recount their experience of detention in Tariq al Sikka, one of Libya's official detention centers, where they were held for three to four months in early 2017 following the violent raid in Gargaresh. Through their testimonies, we confront the devastating conditions inside - extreme overcrowding, lack of food, sanitation, and medical care, and the constant threat of violence - while interrogating the role of the European Union and the International Organization for Migration in sustaining this system. We examine how the EU-IOM Joint Initiative and the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding, both launched around the same time YAIM members were detained, may have shaped what happened to them, and why guards in Tariq al Sikka suddenly suspended their usual practice of extortion. Trigger warning: the following content contains references to physical violence, torture, and inhumane conditions of detention which some individuals may find distressing.

In this episode of Displacing Universities Svitlana and Ian speak with Marie-Christine Ukelo-Mbolo Merga about Perspectives AlterEgauZ* at the University of Fribourg.

In this episode of Displacing Universities Ian speaks with Paul O’Keefe. Paul worked for many years at in Kakkuma refugee camp in Kenya, including for the University of Geneva’s Inzone project. He also has strong ties with Vijana Twaweza Club, a sustainable agriculture organisation which is based in the camp, a group he keeps in touch with as part of his new job as Head of Education and Research at Airfield Estate in Dublin.