Migrants and Refugees in the 21st Century: Children in and out of schools

We are pleased to invite you to the Thirteenth International School on Mind, Brain and Education (ISMBE) “Migrants and Refugees in the 21st Century: Children in and out of schools”, to be held at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture, in Erice (Sicily) Italy, October 15 – 21, 2018.

As you can see at the following website, the ISMBE has a long history of bringing together researchers from disparate fields to catalyze research relating cognitive science and neuroscience to education: www.mbe-erice.org

Global migratory flows involve diverse populations from heterogeneous socio-cultural, racial, and religious backgrounds. Since the dawn of the millennium the world is witnessing a rapid rise in the numbers of a plurality of migrants— voluntary & involuntary, internal & international, authorized & unauthorized, environmental refugees and victims of human trafficking. Today the lives over a billion people are shaped by migration—they are either international, internal migrants, or family members left behind. All of these flows have intensified under the ascendancy of climate change, rachitic and collapsing states, war and terror, and growing global inequality.
At a time when approximately 20 human beings are forcefully displaced every minute http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html, catastrophic migrations pose new international risks to millions of migrants and challenge the institutions of sending, transit, and receiving nations alike. While immigration is normative, it has taken a dystopic turn.
Worldwide, civil and ethnic wars, structural violence, unchecked climate change, environmental cataclysms, and poverty are behind the largest displacement of people since World War II.  Today there are over 65 million forcefully displaced and 22.5 million formal refugees of whom half are children and youth. We are convening a week-long Course involving leading scientists, social scientists, humanists, religious leaders, policy makers, philanthropists, practitioners, and NGOs, on the education of migrant and refugee children and youth.

We expect to have twenty-six participants in our course. Both senior and junior researchers from several countries of America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific are being invited to join this academic experience. We will invite each participant to give a 30- minute talk. We shall endeavor to cultivate and disseminate high quality data and conceptual work, relevant policy interventions, and best practices as a way to shape new practices and inform change.