Refugee Week
June 2023 onwards
Refugee Week is the world’s largest arts & culture festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. It was founded in 1998 in the UK and is held every year around World Refugee Day on 20 June. Refugee Week 2023 (19-25 June 2023) will be the 25th anniversary of the festival
You can find out more about Refugee Week at the Refugee Week website.
Our approach to Refugee Week
Rather than focusing intensely on work around refugeeism for one week in the year, we want to use Refugee Week to start off a programme of work which will be spread out through the year.
You can read more about our new approach to commemorative days in this blog post: https://www.racearchive.org.uk/beyond-refugee-week-our-new-approach-to-refugee-week-black-history-month-international-womens-day-etc/
On 21 June, as the first part of our programme, we held a round table event with a small group of people whose experience of working with young people fed in to a discussion about cultivating compassion and critical thinking in young people around the issues of refugeeism. You can download more information about this here: https://www.racearchive.org.uk/download/refugee-week-2023-focus-group/
You can read a report of the event from one of our student helpers here: https://www.racearchive.org.uk/refugee-week-nurturing-compassion-and-critical-thinking/
We will use this discussion to inform our work around refugeeism throughout the year.
The year ahead
We will be posting more about our continuing work on refugeeism on this page, including the outcomes of the discussion on 21 June and guidance on resources.
Previous years
You can find some of our previous activity around Refugee Week on these blog posts: