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PhD students Ayham Alhuseen and Iryna Gokhman attend the Oxford Summer School on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies
Doctoral research can be an isolating journey, but opportunities for exchange and training play a crucial role in shaping young scholars. For PhD students Ayham Alhuseen and Iryna Gokhman, the Oxford Summer School on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies was such an opportunity.
Iryna Gokhman is a PhD student in Applied Social Studies at University College Cork, where she contributes to the ERC-funded MIGMOBS project on migration, mobility and inequality. Her doctoral research examines how Ukrainians displaced to Ireland experience everyday life, with a particular focus on how categories such as legal definitions, public labels, and social perceptions shape their ability to create a sense of home in a new environment.
Ayham Alhuseen is a PhD researcher in Refugee Mobilities at the University of Leeds, contributing to the ERC-funded MIGMOBS project. His doctoral research examines how temporariness is weaponised against refugees, focusing on how policies of waiting and uncertainty shape displaced people’s mobilities, sense of stability, and capacity to plan for the future. His work builds on his lived experience as a Syrian refugee and professional experience in conflict transformation, humanitarian programming, and monitoring and evaluation across the Middle East and Europe.
From June 23 to 27, 2025, Ayham and Iryna attended an Oxford online Summer School on refugee and migration studies. The program provided a space to explore how refugee protection is structured by conceptual, legal and moral frameworks. It also examined the history of displacement and its legacies, while linking them to present-day questions of citizenship, deprivation and mobility.
The curriculum is structured around core modules such as Conceptualising Forced Migration, International Law and Refugee Protection, Moral Foundations of Refugeehood, and The Politics of Humanitarianism. Optional modules offer further depth on topics that shift each year.
Participants are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds: those working within humanitarian organisations or NGOs, government or policy roles, academics (including postgraduate or postdoctoral researchers), as well as journalists, advocates, and people with lived experience of displacement. The common thread is substantial prior engagement with refugee or forced migration issues.
What made the School distinctive was not only the lectures, but also the discussion-based learning, reflection, and critical comparison of different legal, moral, and conceptual frameworks that govern responses to displacement. It provided a structured space to question dominant paradigms, to engage with global perspectives, and to consider how academic and legal knowledge intersects with lived experience.
For Iryna, the most valuable aspect of the program was its focus on the role of categories in shaping forced migration. She reflected on how legal definitions determine rights and entitlements, how public labels influence integration and belonging, and how these systems often constrain the agency of displaced people. In her upcoming research, she intends to apply these insights by not only analysing categories in the contemporary Irish context, but also by viewing them through a historical lens. Examining how categories have evolved over time and how past systems of classification continue to resonate in present-day responses to displacement will enable her to trace the deeper roots of inclusion and exclusion.
For Ayham, three aspects of the program were especially meaningful. The session on domicide with Dr. Ammar Azzouz highlighted how the destruction of architecture and urban spaces in Syria is not only material, but also an erasure of memory, identity, and belonging. This resonated strongly with his broader interest in how forced migration reshapes human geographies. The module on refugee law further underscored the power of legal definitions: who counts as a refugee is not a neutral question, but one that determines whose lives are afforded protection and whose are left in limbo. Finally, the film The Wait by Maher Abdel Aziz offered a powerful meditation on time. Its portrayal of bureaucratic waiting contrasted with human lived time, showing how displaced people create small, self-chosen routines to reclaim agency and mental stability. Together, these insights deepened Ayham’s commitment to exploring how space, law, and time are intertwined in shaping the lives of refugees.