Spotlight on the RELIEF Centre

Part of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, the RELIEF Centre is a hub for research and learning focused on inclusive growth and prosperity. It is about the prosperity of Lebanon in particular, but it is also part of a larger agenda for developing sustainable ways to improve the quality of life of people throughout the world. Here, the centre rounds up highlights from their activity over the last three months.

With articles published in The Guardian and on the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Impact blog, the publication of the centre’s first working paper, fieldwork trips and workshops between Lebanon and London, along with the first event organised by the RELIEF Cultural Committee, the last three months have been busy for the RELIEF Centre.

As the centre moves into its second year, the staff are spending more time in the field and devising new activities as part of the centre’s public engagement strategy. Staff continue to enjoy existing collaborations, and have also created many exciting new opportunities to share their work with others. Highlights from over summer 2018 include:

• The inaugural RELIEF Centre Cultural Committee event ‘Representing Refuge: The Role of the Arts in Mass Displacement’ on 15 June 2018, organised as part of the UCL Festival of Culture 2018, aimed to promote a conversation around media and humanitarian representations of refuge and displacement, and explore how artistic expressions can open up new avenues of self-representation, research and advocacy.
• Invitation to write a blog post for ESRC’s Impact Blog as part of UK Refugee Week 2018, submitting ‘The place of prosperity in protracted refugee crises’.
• In July, the first RELIEF Centre Working Paper was published on data: ‘Data Audit: Requirements for Improving Measures and Outcome Indicators in Lebanon’. This report provides an analysis of the social, economic and political data sources available in Lebanon and their quality. It will provide the basis for our work with data going forward.

Researchers from the Future Education research theme met in August for the Educators for Change: Teacher professional development (TPD) in the context of mass displacement workshop at the UCL Institute of Education. This workshop is part of a series organised by the team based around teacher professional development in the context of mass displacement. It discussed the development of a curriculum for the Educators for Change Massive Online Open Course (MOOC). The team was joined by officials from the Ministry of Education in Lebanon, Lebanese academics and NGO educators.