Social Responsibility and Higher Education: university engagement in intercultural dialogue with excluded refugee youth

• In Event: Education, Culture and Learning in Response to Conflict and Protracted Crisis

Proposal

Higher Education is now at the forefront of the international discourse to promote the social responsibility and to lead society in generating global knowledge to address global challenges, which involve education in conflict and crisis situations and intercultural dialogue. (The Conference Communiqué of the UNESCO World Conference of Higher Education (WCHE) in 2009).
The plight of refugee young people is a misfortune that requires sensitive care and attention to better. They have come to the UK to seek sanctuary from war caused by geopolitical events to which our European and American countries – the so-called Global North – have contributed. The paper offers a critical engagement with the idea of intercultural dialogue (UNESCO 2013) to explore how university can engage with excluded refugees and how higher education can prepare the students to be the cultural mediators.

Through the case study, elite university students met with refugees’ youth of Syrian and Iraqi background who have arrived in the area. Three case study’s workshops focused on building bridges, sharing life narratives and educational experiences through photo exposes, learning a song together, taking a walking tour of the university campus, and co-constructing the “ideal” university. In exploring whether higher education can create a sense of solidarity and intercultural dialogue between excluded refugee and university students, we present observation of and reflection on the process, and the multiple understandings of experience collected from university students and refugee youth to identify the spaces of inclusion of these young people into the structures of our society – education, language, and culture.

The discussion of the findings considers whether and how higher education can create a sense of solidarity and intercultural dialogue between excluded refugee and university students.

Author

• Marta Moskal, University of Glasgow