We are delighted to announce that the Gil Loescher Memorial Fund has made two new awards this year to support original research on refugees and forced displacement by Oxford graduate students.
This year’s recipients are Alessandra Enrico-Headrington (left), who is in the second year of a DPhil in Migration Studies, and Emily Venturi (right), who is a first-year student on the DPhil in International Development.
Alessandra’s DPhil project explores the evolving asylum and immigration policies in three Andean countries, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, with a particular focus on the South-South mobility of Venezuelans. Central to her analysis is the rise of temporary protection legal mechanisms and their impact on asylum, as well as on how migrants navigate these frameworks while shaping their futures. By adopting a dual perspective – top-down and bottom-up – her research aims to provide insights into both policy shifts and the lived experiences of migrants, an approach that remains unexplored in South America. In doing so, her research examines the broader implications of these evolving legal mechanisms, particularly how they may transform asylum processes and influence the long-term prospects of migrants in the region.
The funding will allow Alessandra to build on existing fieldwork by carrying out follow-up interviews with government and UN officials, civil society organisations, and asylum seekers in Quito, Ecuador, and Bogotá, Colombia.
Emily’s doctoral research focuses on refugee-centred perspectives on self-reliance and labour mobility. Via mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, her project explores how forcibly displaced people define self-reliance and make livelihoods and mobility decisions within structural constraints faced during protracted displacement. Grounded in refugees’ own definitions and priorities, the research aims to problematise the concept of ‘self-reliance’ and contribute a nuanced interpretation to policy and programming.
The funding will enable Emily to carry out qualitative data collection in Bogotá, Colombia, through interviews and focus group discussions with refugees and host communities.
About the Fund
The Gil Loescher Memorial Fund supports research with a connection to refugees or forced displacement, ideally with policy relevance. Awards are for up to £2000, and eligible costs include travel, subsistence, and data collection costs in any region of the world. All graduate students at the University are eligible to apply, although priority will be given to applicants from the Global South and/or with lived experience of displacement.