Duration: 2025 - 2026
Funding Scheme: Edinburgh Global
Principal Investigator: Afnan El-Gayar
The Challenge
The voices of refugee-background students are often silenced by institutional structures not designed with them in mind. Access to higher education is shaped by a range of bureaucratic, financial, linguistic, and cultural factors that are often invisible to mainstream policy and institutional design. For refugee-background students, these systems should be opportunities, but instead can become barriers. Refugee-background students often face invisibility and marginalisation within academic institutions which frequently reflect dominant cultural norms and assumptions that do not account for the complex experiences of displacement and cultural transition that many refugee-background students carry upon arrival in the UK.
Research Aims
The Refugee Education Listening Lab aims to offer an inclusive and reflective space in which students can share their journeys and challenges. These personal narratives will be used to generate actionable insights and recommendations that inform EBB programming and broader university policy. The challenges to create an environment where their perspectives are not only acknowledged but actively shape university responses to issues of inclusion and academic access. In that sense, the initiative seeks to reshape the policies and practices of higher education through their lived realities.
Outcomes and Impact
The project will produce:
A qualitative body of insights into the lived experiences of refugee students, articulating both the systemic barriers they encounter and the support they have access to and value.
These insights will be translated into a report and an artistic public-facing output by a creative practitioner.
Develop the facilitation and ethical storytelling skills of participating peer listeners, building student capacity for future engagement and advocacy work.
After conclusion, a final feedback event between students, staff and community partners will offer a space for dialogue which will enable collaborative reflection and next-step planning for EBB and the wider university.
