News

News from the project and partners

Best paper award

We received the best paper award for the Gender and Enterprise Track at the conference of the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship 2018. The paper was also nominated for the Best Research & Knowledge Exchange award but we were happy to lose out to Ossie Jones and Benito Giordano on that one!

The paper is entitled Performing Masculinity through Enterprise: Syrian Male Refugee Artisans in Jordan, and is co-authored by Haya Al-Dajani – project principal investigator and the project co-investigators – Marta Hawkins and Geoff Wilson, and the project’s research assistant Hoayda Darkal.

View certificate

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Syrian Artisan Entrepreneurship Project<br></p>

Thursday 25 October 2018

Sharing the project’s deliverabes

Under the patronage of Her Excellency Ms Lina Ennab, Jordanian Minister for Tourism and Antiquities, the project concluded with a Dissemination Event on Thursday 25 October 2018 at Tiraz in Amman, Jordan. The event was attended by policy makers, cultural heritage business owners, artisans, and representatives of local and international organisations working with Syrian and other refugees in Jordan.

Following presentations about the project, results, and social enterprise toolkit, we deliberated and agreed the policy recommendations emerging from the project. These are captured within the policy brief, which has been shared with decision makers in Jordan and will be available in the downloadable resources section of the project’s website.

<p>Syrian Artisan Entrepreneurship Project</p>

Tuesday 13 March 2018

Dr Marta Hawkins, attended the British Council’s launch of the ‘Language for Resilience’ exhibition in London. This impactful event focused specifically on the role of language in building resilience among refugees; “research has been undertaken in Jordan, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey-interviewing teachers, ministry of education officials, children, parents, volunteers and NGO staff”. The outcomes were presented in a sensitive and visually compelling manner: the silky, floating, translucent banners with imprinted quotations from refugees and researchers represented the tenuousness of the situation and fragility of language communication. The designers of the exhibition installed the 3D version of some poignant statements that needed 3D glasses to be deciphered. The question emerged from there: what do the refugee host communities really know about the refugees and is the mutual understanding possible if the basic barrier is language?

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CEO of <a href="https://twitter.com/BritishCouncil">@<b>BritishCouncil</b></a> Sir Ciarán Devane

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when you are a refugee, you need food, shelter, safety, but you also need hope” #languageforResilience Education must be available to refugee children to enable them to speak up for themselves & parents

Wednesday 7 June 2017

Mobilising Global Voices, London

At the AHRC International Development Summit, Dr Marta Hawkins (University of Plymouth) and Dr Diana Abouali (Tiraz, Jordan) discussed the Syrian Artisan Entrepreneurship Project during the session entitled Mobilising the Arts: Migration and Forced Displacement.

Key messages from the Summit as captured by Said Ebbini (King Hussein Foundation Information and Research Center, Jordan), and Dr Rawan Ibrahim (Tiraz, Jordan) include:

The urgent need to create strong multidisciplinary partnerships
The relative lack of intermixing between the academic and practitioner worlds has denied both the wealth of knowledge and experience of each other
The leadership and strategic planning of development needs to be gradually shifted to the global south
Impact needs to be complex. concerned with, and cognizant of, the long-term implications and the sustainability of development in the local context.

Leading Jordanian artisans and heritage entrepreneurs came together with representatives from UN agencies and other international, national and local agencies working with Syrian refugees to share their expert opinions, experiences and knowledge about the current state of the Syrian cultural heritage, and the enterprising efforts in Jordan for preserving it.

Given the feed-forward from the participants, the research team will adjust the sampling framework to include Jordanian key informants and artisans alongside the Syrian refugee artisans residing in Jordan. In doing so, we will capture the nuances around the dynamics between the Jordanian and Syrian artisan communities, to reflect a more holistic and comprehensive perspective.

Data collection with Syrian refugee male artisans operating enterprises that they established in Jordan at least three years ago will begin in May. Do get in touch to direct us towards such artisans.