Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination

Please join us for the celebratory launch of 'Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination' by Dr Anthea Vogl.

There will be refreshments from 5pm for those attending in person, followed by a one-hour discussion of the book at 5:30pm AEDT with Dr Anthea Vogl, Dr Tina Dixson, Associate Professor Maria Giannacopoulos and Associate Professor Daniel Ghezelbash.

This hybrid panel event is co-hosted by UNSW's Centre for Criminology, Law & Justice, and the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.

Date: Wednesday 20 November, 2024
Where: Level 2, Staff Common Room, Law & Justice Building, UNSW Sydney
In-person: 5pm refreshments, 5.30pm - 6.30pm panel discussion
Virtual: 5.30pm - 6.30pm AEDT panel discussion

Short description:

In Judging Refugees Anthea Vogl investigates the black box of the refugee oral hearing and the politics of narrative within individualised processes for refugee status determination (RSD). Drawing on a rich archive of administrative oral hearings in Australia and Canada, Vogl sets global trends of diminished and fast-tracked RSD against the critical role played by the discretionary spaces of refugee decision-making, and the gate-keeping functions of credibility assessment.

About the author:
Anthea Vogl is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She teaches and researches in the fields of refugee and migration law, focusing on the social and legal categories of the refugee and non-citizen, executive decision-making, and the criminology of border control. Anthea co-runs the clinical refugee law program at UTS Law and is currently co-Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project on community refugee sponsorship, and a national research grant examining the legal needs and health requirements imposed on non-citizens living with blood borne viruses in Australia. Anthea is an Associate of Border Criminologies at Oxford University and author of Judging Refugees: Narrative and Oral Testimony in Refugee Status Determination (CUP, 2024).

Guest speakers:
Dr Tina Dixson (she/her) is an early career academic, advocate, and social policy professional with experience in advancing LGBTIQA+ equality, refugee protection, and responses to gender-based violence. Tina has her own experience of queer displacement, having been forced to leave Ukraine with her partner Dr Renee Dixson due to their LGBTIQA+ activism. In Australia, Tina was involved in the establishment of the Forcibly Displaced People Network (FDPN), the first LGBTIQA+ refugee-led organisation in the country. Tina’s doctoral research focused on the lived experiences of queer and trans refugee women exploring narratives surrounding their displacement and continuation of violence. She lives on the lands of Ngunnawal people with her partner Renee and their two dogs Sandy and Sky.
Dr Maria Giannacopoulos (she/her) is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Criminology Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. She holds a BA(Hons) LLB (Hons) and a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a leading scholar in decolonising approaches to law and criminology. An interdisciplinary scholar and a second-generation migrant from Greece, Maria draws upon her lived history and experiences of assimilation and integration in her scholarship. Across her work Maria has sustained a critical focus upon the operations of settler law to reveal its role in maintaining colonial relations of power that impacts most acutely upon Indigenous peoples, refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. In 2023 she delivered the prestigious annual John Barry Lecture in Criminology at the University of Melbourne titled ‘Law Reform and Sovereign Refusal in the Colonial Debtscape’.
Dr Daniel Ghezelbash (he/him) is Associate Professor and the Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney, and an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow. Daniel is a practicing refugee lawyer and an internationally recognised scholar of international and comparative refugee and migration law. His ARC DECRA Fellowship examines comparative practices to develop recommendations for improving the fairness and efficiency of Australia's asylum procedures. He has also published widely on the way restrictive asylum policies have spread around the world and is the topic of his book, 'Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World' (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has spent time as a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

Registration is also open for the 2024 Emerging Scholars Network Annual Workshop! Register . Co-hosted by the and the at UNSW Sydney, it is a hybrid event held over three days from Wednesday 20 to Friday 22 November in Sydney, Australia. The workshop brings together early career scholars in the field of refugee and forced migration studies and this book launch event will commence directly following the workshop panels on Day 1.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Level 2 Staff Common Room, UNSW Law & Justice Building - G23, UNSW Sydney, Kensington, Australia