Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow where she is professor of languages and intercultural studies.

Tawona Sitholé is lecturer in creative practice education within the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts. In research and teaching I am part of CLIP (Culture, Literacies, Inclusion and Pedagogy).

Better known as Ganyamatope (his ancestral family name) his heritage inspires me to make connections with other people through creativity, and the natural outlook to learn. Educated by assigned teachers through the schooling system, and by natural teachers through ‘pasichigare’ (his ancestors lifestyle), He benefits from having more than one way of knowing/learning. As a result, he finds myself playing many roles in creativity and education. He is a poet, playwright, storyteller and musician.

Hyab Yohannes is a lecturer in forced migration and decolonial education with the UNESCO Chair RIELA at the University of Glasgow. Hyab’s research interests include poetics, decoloniality, and political theories across physical, onto-epistemic, spatio-temporal, and juridico-political dimensions.

Abstract:

Over a period of nearly ten years the Conservative United Kingdom Government took the decision to use Overseas Development Assistance money from the 0.7 percent allocation of GDP for building research capacity in international development. This was fixed on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. It allowed a considerable amount of research to be led and undertaken from the majority world and for academics in the United Kingdom to work with their peers on projects which were both practically and financially decolonizing. At least that was one possibility. In practice United Kingdom institutions also saw the fund as a way of covering overheads to fund their own operational costs.

Nonetheless, this fraught and messy space of compromised funding enabled the capacitating of peer research and a deepening of relationships to scholarship which was decolonial in design and intent.

In this talk one particular project will be presented which worked with partners in Morocco, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Ghana, The Gaza Strip, Palestine and with young people seeking asylum in Scotland. The project was focused on examining the contribution of cultural workers to research and also to conflict transformation and gender-based violence in these contexts, led by cultural workers and academics in each context, according to their own designs, and with both academic and cultural research as co-created outcomes. The three speakers will present the decolonial theoretical work, the cultural work and examples and then fraught politics of the funding environment from a project which bears the hallmarks of who-dunnit novel!