The Role of Community Sponsorship for Refugee Resettlement

Kate will present research being undertaken for her ARC project on refugee community sponsorship (Discovery Project with Professor Susan Kneebone and Dr Anthea Vogl). The project is the first large-scale study of community or private sponsorship of refugees in Australia and includes comparisons with Canada, UK, Ireland and New Zealand. There are myriad models of refugee community sponsorship but most involve citizen groups funding and assisting with refugee resettlement. While Canada has had such programs for over 40 years and Australia’s first program started in 1979, until very recently there has been minimal academic literature on community sponsorship. Early scholarship celebrated the successes of Canadian programs and aimed to export Canadian sponsorship models to other countries. However, scholars are now raising more critical questions about the role and practice of community sponsorship. Kate, Susan and Anthea’s project will investigate how notions of citizenship, community and sanctuary are conceptualised and mobilised by different community sponsorship actors and critically evaluate community sponsorship’s role nationally (against the background of Australia’s infamous refugee policies) and globally in the context of growing displacement and Global North/South inequities in refugee responsibility. Kate is particularly interested in exploring sponsors’ understandings and enactments of ‘sanctuary’.

This event is presented in person and online. Zoom details below

Speaker
Associate Professor Kate Ogg has been at the ANU since 2013. She completed her PhD at RegNet and is now an Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Higher Degree Research) at the ANU College of Law. Her areas of research are refugee law, forced migration and displacement, human rights law (with a focus on human mobility), litigation, and feminist legal theory and method. Kate is the author of Protection from Refuge: From Refugee Rights to Migration Management (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The monograph is the first global and comparative examination of the role courts play in refugee journeys.

This series is an ANU-wide collaboration spearheaded by the Migration Hub @ ANU, in collaboration with the School of Archaeology and Anthropology

For online attendance, see Zoom details below
https://anu.zoom.us/j/86557701787?pwd=cnIreVB5eG8vNmlibWtHMjRKaEtIZz09
(Meeting ID: 865 5770 1787. Password: 836061)