Refugee Transition Network
Funding: 5 July 2023 - 5 July 2024, Funded by AHRC
Project summary
Transition Design as an emerging framework proposes collaborative design-led practices as a vehicle to create new narratives and approaches needed to address complex (wicked) problems and transitions towards more sustainable futures. It has been developed and used with Traditional Ecological Knowledge Systems (TEK) found in indigenous and local communities to re-design visions of their own development and systemic change.
There is little evidence of its application in the context of displaced populations. Our interest is to explore how transition design can inform the creation of new, much needed, narratives about urban refugee management, that would support a shift from the focus of "what refugees lack" towards "what refugees bring".
The project aims to build an international network of stakeholders and researchers, to explore the use of Transition Design and the idea of the city as commons, as a future methodology to inform urban refugee management.
Project team list
- Principal Investigator: Dr Malé Luján Escalante
- Co-Investigator: Dr Chris Mortimer, Deputy Academic Dean Lancaster University Beijing Jiaotong University
- International Principal Investigator: Dr Akino Tahir – Resilience Development Initiative Indonesia
- Design Manager: Loretta Mao
- Researcher: Marupa Hasudungan Sianturi
Objectives
- To create Refugee Transition Network (RTN) with relevant academic and non-academic partners, such as researchers, stakeholders, practitioners, observers, and refugee-led organisations. Through the network, we intend to further reinforce relations, create memorandum of understanding, and assemble a steering group with relevant partners for future research projects.
- To gather cases of good practice and successful methods in the use of Transition Design and the 'City as Commons' in the context of urban refugee management to create a bilingual (English and Bahasa) teaching resource.
- To gather initial insights from creative workshops applying the Transition Design framework with practitioners and communities of refugees, in the UK and Indonesia.
Activities
International round table: pluriversal borderlands
The round table is centred around the intersections between Transition Design, City as Commons and Urban Refugee Management. Refugee Transition Network wants to nurture a space for knowledge exchange among our academics and practitioners working in these areas. Fostering up to date conversations, and gather emerging methods, tools, and good practice cases within a cohesive context and framework.
Good practice cases – educational resource
Refugee Transition Network wants to create a good practice cases compilation, bilingual (English and Bahasa) methodological resource directed to students. This resource enables the inclusion of the Transition Design framework into the curricula of the academics involved within the network. It will also contribute to capacity building among practitioners and support the advancement of Educational Design Research (EDR) practices.
Piloting methods – workshops with refugees and practitioners
The workshops bring together refugees and practitioners from refugee-led organisations to co-design, incorporating the contexts of their values, lifestyles and mindsets into the ideation process. These workshops are important for testing methods and ideas that will shape the future of the network.
Collaborative student challenge
In January 2024 UAL's London College of Communication Design School will be holding a collaborative challenge in the framework of the collaborative unit that partners students across institutions to explore transition design. Informing collaborative tools to engage with refugees and vulnerable communities, imagining relation design that is feminist, postcapitalist and pluriversal.
