Centre for Refugee Studies celebrates 25 years with roundtable on humanitarianism in Africa

Patricia Daley

York’s Centre for Refugee Studies is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a roundtable discussion followed by a keynote speech by Patricia Daley of Oxford University.

At the first event, Daley will discuss Refugees, IDPS and Citizenship Rights: The Perils of Humanitarianism in the African Great Lakes Region as part of a graduate student roundtable conversation, Thursday, Nov. 28, from noon to 1pm, 138 Health Patricia DaleyNursing & Environmental Studies Building, Keele campus. RSVP to leev@yorku.ca before the event to receive a copy of the paper and lunch.

Patricia Daley

At the second event she will deliver the keynote speech on “Problematizing International Discourses on Displacement and Sexual Violence in Central Africa”, Nov. 28, from 3 to 5pm, 519 Kaneff Tower.

Daley is a university lecturer in human geography and a geography tutor, as well as an official Fellow, at Jesus College, Oxford University. Her principal research interests are on the intersection between global geo-politics, militarism, masculinities, genocidal violence, humanitarianism and forced migration in East and Central Africa. She is also interested in the dynamics of land tenure, resource extraction and environmental change from a political ecology perspective.

Her other projects include an examination of the condition of new African diaspora communities in Great Britain. She focuses on issues relating to their spatial distribution, socio-economic status and housing characteristics, and the negotiation of their multiple identities, especially that arising from the experience of trans-racial fostering.

Her book, Gender and Genocide: the Search for Spaces of Peace in Central Africa, says Daley, demonstrates that “we cannot make sense of contemporary violence in Central Africa without an understanding of its historical roots and its link with the form of the modern state that emerged during and after the period of colonial rule”.

Daley is also a peer reviewer for Political Geography, Third World Quarterly, CODESRIA Journals, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Refugee Studies, Ethics, Place and Environment, and the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.