The Politics of Education and Hope in Forced Migration: Journeys of Syrian Young People Across the World

This talk introduces Dr. Hiba Salem’s forthcoming monograph, which shares the stories of Syrian young people who have grown up in displacement. Drawing on life story interviews with Syrian refugee youth across nine contexts, the talk explores how they navigate life and aspirations amid hostile immigration policies and arrangements that enforce uncertainty. It reveals the disjuncture between the universal promise of education and the lived realities of displacement, situating their experiences within a dialogue between the fields of education and forced migration studies. By centring young people’s voices and their strategies of hope, their stories highlight the need to reconstruct narratives on forced migration by foregrounding the everyday struggles people face in exercising their universal rights to education, to work, and to build meaningful lives.

Hiba Salem was the 2022–2025 Pedro Arrupe Fellow in Forced Migration Studies at the University of Oxford. She earned her PhD and MPhil in Education from the University of Cambridge. Her work explores the role of education in conflict-affected contexts, focusing on how education policies and practices intersect with forced migration processes and what education means to communities living with profound uncertainty. Hiba has conducted extensive fieldwork—particularly with Syrian and Palestinian young people—to understand how aspirations are imagined, negotiated, and lived amid social, economic, and political precarity and injustice. 

We warmly invite you to join us for the Michaelmas Term Campion Lecture, delivered by Dr. Hiba Salem. To book your place, for in-person or online attendance, please follow this link.