We are delighted to invite you and your organisation to a fringe event to celebrate Refugee Week 2017 and to discuss ways to resist educational immobilities in and beyond British universities. The event is co-organised by the Activism in Sociology Forum (ASF) of British Sociological Association, the Refugee Research Archive at University of East London (UEL) and the Oral History Society Migration Special Interest Group. It will be held on Monday 19th June alongside a tour of the Refugee Council Archive at UEL showcasing selected photographs from the exhibition by Bill Knight entitled “The Refugee's Gift”, as part of supporting Refugee Week activities.

Co-hosted by the Refugee Research Archive and OLIve students and staff at UEL, the meeting will build on a previous fringe event of ASF held in Birmingham in 2016. It will be combined with short provocations by activists, migrant rights advocates, refugee scholars and students leading on to a workshop on access to education and resisting educational immobilities in higher education. Our starting point is where we have ended in 2016, before Brexit, at the second ASF fringe meeting which was held at British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Birmingham. What we see to be the difficulty of accessing education and producing intellectual – especially critical and political – work in British universities and elsewhere. It was previously highlighted how the fact that universities have dominated the post-16 education landscape for some time means that a cooperative university would have a long way to go to become comprehensive. At the end of the dialogical and interactive discussion, participants had left the meeting room with an urge to continue that dialogue. The aim of the to be held event is to think about and share ideas and practices on what is to be done about access to education, especially regarding asylum seekers and refugees, in post-Brexit Britain and elsewhere.

Questions for provocation include but not limited to:

How do we ensure the widest possible participation in our universities and intellectual practices in a time rising nationalism?

Is radical praxis enough for accessing education and resisting intellectual immobilities within and outside universities? What actions and praxis are necessary to resist educational immobilities within universities?

We also search for answers to questions such as how do students engage with social transformation and be active in promoting social change that is attentive to inequalities of class, ethnicity, gender, race and sexuality and aligned with struggles to confront and eliminate them? How do we achieve an inclusive and diversified and empowering education given the fact that contemporary political frictions and the rise of right wing politics in the UK, in Europe and elsewhere point to an increasingly divisive society? How long way to go for a ‘cooperative’ university to become comprehensive?