Following my first supervision meeting, I’ve begun reshaping my project to reflect a more explicit focus and respond to current sector realities. One major shift is the move towards an analytical report format, emphasising understanding what makes education initiatives for refugees resilient or fragile, and the persistence required to sustain them.
A key part of this new direction will be conducting a landscape analysis to understand what educational programmes currently operate in the refugee education space. This includes exploring existing funding models, the impact of recent political shifts, and the consequences of agency withdrawal or programme collapse due to funding cuts. These issues have become more pressing following reductions in US government support to UN agencies like IOM and UNHCR, which have significantly shaped my personal investment in this topic.
The project will now focus specifically on child learners, narrowing the broader lens of “lifelong learning.” I plan to engage with the work of researchers involved in the space of refugee education to inform my thinking.
Methodologically, I’ll work primarily with secondary data sources for ethical and practical reasons. I also plan to conduct brief interviews with staff from humanitarian organisations to complement the data and close with futures-focused questions, drawing on Voros’ Futures Cone to explore scenarios.
