About the speaker:
Georgia Cole is the Margaret Anstee Research Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Until September 2018 she was the Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellow in Development Studies at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford having completed her DPhil in International Development at the Oxford Department of International Development in 2016 on the topic of ‘Beyond the Politics of Labelling: Exploring the Cessation Clauses for Rwandan and Eritrean Refugees through Semiotics’.

Her research during the Joyce Pearce Junior Research Fellowship explored the role and value of refugee status according to displaced communities themselves. In response to the observation that refugee status is continually evolving to suit States, rather than refugees, it asked what the continuing ‘value’ of refugee status is for those individuals seeking protection, and durable solutions in particular. It involved ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork, primarily with displaced Eritreans, to explore their expectations and experiences of refugee status and alternative pathways to protection.

She taught on courses at the Refugee Studies Centre and previously taught at the Department of Geography at the University of Oxford and as a Research and Teaching Fellow at the College of Arts and Social Sciences in Eritrea. She was a co-convener of the Oxford Central Africa Forum, and previously served as Co-Editor in Chief of the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration. She is currently the Book Review Editor of the Journal of Refugee Studies.

She holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from Oxford, and a BA (Hons) in Geography from Trinity College, Cambridge.

www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/to-be-or-not-to-be-questioning-the-value-of-refugee-status