British International Studies Association Early Career Research Grant

If you’re a UK-based member in your early career, this research funding might be for you. We launched the Early Career Small Research Grants (ECSRG) in 2015 in celebration of our 40th anniversary, and provide up to £3,000 per grant. In any one year we give a maximum of three grants.

Please note the following rules on eligible costs. The funds can be used for travel and fieldwork expenses, access to archives, research training, transcription, short-term research assistance, and translation. The funds CANNOT be used to buy out individual staff time, run a conference/workshop(s), or to cover any overheads.

Formal refugee camps continue to be the main site of scholarly research and aid policy, positioning refugee communities living outside of camps - considered ‘urban refugees’ - as a site of risk. Refugee communities are increasingly geographically spread, and more difficult to identify, categorise and secure. Without clear categories, the rural, both as a space and form of living, has been understudied in academic literature and excluded in policy and practice in international aid, resulting in an international aid policy unable to effectively respond to rural refugee needs. Rural refugees are not seasonal migrants who contribute to rural or environmental development solutions or the domestic economy, but ordinary people living outside of existing migration frameworks. To the detriment of rural refugees, humanitarian action has become a system of technocratic governance, capable of their political, social and conceptual erasure.
This project therefore investigates the exclusion of the rural in international aid work, examining the policy, political and everyday consequences of overlooking or amalgamating specific geographical spaces. It makes a major conceptual contribution to current approaches in critical humanitarianism and refugee studies by unpacking the refugee experience, starting with refugees’ own conceptualisations of the rural and settlement strategies in displacement. Combining data collected through participatory workshops and focus group with rurally-based refugees and (inter)national aid workers in Zaatari Village, Ramtha and Amman, Jordan, my project investigates this erasure, to develop an investigation into what a relevant and useful rural refugee response could look like.