UEA Refugee Week

How can universities truly move beyond symbolic gestures to genuinely support displaced and at-risk scholars?

This question shaped my keynote address, Gateways or Gatekeepers?, delivered at the University of East Anglia’s Voices of Resilience Research Forum during Refugee Week, June 2025. The event brought together researchers, students, and practitioners to consider the role of higher education in offering sanctuary and academic support. I valued it as a rare academic space where the lived realities of displacement were not a side note, but the starting point for discussion — and that made it a particularly powerful platform for the arguments I wanted to advance.

Barriers to belonging — and the value of naming them

One of the most important contributions of the Research Forum was that it created a space where exclusion could be named openly, without defensiveness or euphemism. In my keynote, I situated my arguments in both lived experience and research findings. I drew on two studies: a longitudinal project with displaced Syrian scholars in Europe and the MENA region, and a study of institutional support for displaced scholars at a UK elite university.

From researching displaced scholars, I developed three interconnected concepts — academic poverty, academic death, and academic re-existence — which I recently published in Higher Education (Akkad, 2025). Academic poverty refers to the material and epistemic deprivation resulting from exclusion from resources, networks, and recognition. Academic death describes the point at which formal scholarly activity stops — not through lack of talent or will, but because the structures sustaining academic life have shut scholars out.

One participant captured the human cost of this exclusion: “I am not fully accepted here, and I am disconnected from there. Still, I write, I teach, I contribute. But I always feel like a guest waiting to be invited.”

Naming these conditions in a public, academic forum matters because it disrupts the tendency to treat displacement in abstract or purely humanitarian terms. This clarity is essential if universities are to develop structural responses that move beyond temporary hospitality to genuine inclusion.

Reclaiming academic space

Another key argument I presented — also developed in my Higher Education article — was that exclusion does not mean disappearance; displaced scholars are not passive recipients of support, but active agents reshaping academic life. Many displaced scholars engage in academic re-existence: deliberately and strategically reconfiguring their academic identities, often informally or outside traditional institutional pathways.

Examples from my research projects included scholars who adapted their research agendas to align with global debates while retaining their home-context perspectives, those who sustained intellectual work through informal networks, and those who mentored others despite lacking formal roles. As one participant put it: “I may no longer belong to one institution or one nation, but I carry my knowledge across borders.”

The Forum amplified this idea by giving it visibility before an interdisciplinary audience of doctoral researchers, senior academics, and practitioners. The setting allowed me to present re-existence not as a romanticised tale of resilience, but as a legitimate and necessary form of scholarly contribution — one that universities should recognise and support structurally, if they aim to become truly inclusive.

Beyond hospitality and the sector-wide narratives

I also used the keynote to problematise the “hospitality” narrative that often shapes institutional responses to displaced scholars — a narrative in which they are welcomed temporarily, positioned as guests, and then left to navigate their futures alone.

Drawing on my research, I argued that charity-based or short-term approaches, often led by external NGOs such as the Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara), while important, are insufficient if not embedded within long-term institutional strategies. Without structural integration — in equality, diversity, and inclusion plans, hiring practices, and leadership pathways — such efforts risk reinforcing precarity rather than overcoming it.

My research into the university's institutional support revealed that displaced scholars are largely invisible in core policies. Support is often framed through a humanitarian lens, focusing on gestures like temporary accommodation and meals, rather than through a rights-based framework or strategies for long-term inclusion. Furthermore, these scholars are almost entirely absent from institutional equality, diversity, and inclusion strategies. This invisibility is compounded by a lack of coordinated, university-wide policy, which forces departments and colleges to rely on external agencies like Cara. A key tension also emerged from interviews with university leaders, who were often unsure how to balance humanitarian need with academic merit. This piecemeal approach means that support is often dependent on the financial capacity of individual colleges and departments and the goodwill of specific staff members, rather than on a strategic institutional commitment.

From symbolism to structure — the forum as catalyst

The Forum was not just an opportunity to present research; it was also a way to gauge how receptive an academic audience might be to reframing academic support from a benevolent gesture to a structural commitment. By hosting a keynote and presentations that combined research and lived experience, the organisers signalled that this was not a tokenistic inclusion of a “refugee voice” but a deliberate engagement with scholarship that interrogates systemic inequality.

This distinction matters. Displaced scholars are often invited to speak only about their personal journeys, not about their research. At the UEA Research Forum, scholarly expertise was the focus — a vital shift if universities are to move from symbolic representation to substantive inclusion.

Still, I am conscious that forums alone cannot deliver structural change. Their value lies in whether the ideas raised influence policy, practice, and resource allocation. Without sustained follow-up, there is always a risk that they remain inspiring moments without lasting impact.

A call to reimagine academic support

I view the Research Forum as a powerful example of how academic spaces can be configured to centre displaced scholars’ expertise and challenge sector complacency. My keynote argued — and the day’s discussions reinforced — that universities should move beyond short-term hospitality and recognise displaced scholars as colleagues, co-creators of knowledge, and potential leaders.

If higher education is truly global, it should be accountable to those who persist on its margins not by choice, but through necessity. The value of the UEA Forum was that it contributed to making this accountability visible and urgent. The challenge now is to ensure that resilience is no longer a prerequisite for belonging, and that the possibilities imagined in such spaces are embedded into the everyday structures of our institutions.

References:

Akkad, A. Displaced academics’ mobility and translocational positionalities: ‘Academic poverty’, ‘academic death’, and ‘academic re-existence’. High Educ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01440-0