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Call for Proposals

The Journal of Refugee Studies has launched a call for proposals for special issues. We welcome proposals that engage with and significantly advance scholarly debates in the field of refugee and forced migration studies.  Closing date for proposals 30th April 2024.

Journal of Refugee Studies Early-Career Researcher Prize

The annual Prize will recognize an outstanding article published in an issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies in the preceding calendar year by an early-career researcher.

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New Reviews section of  Journal of Refugee Studies

From 2021,  Journal of Refugee Studies  has replaced the Book Reviews section of the journal with a more inclusive Reviews section. We encourage submissions of materials and sources including written texts and academic manuscripts, but wish to expand significantly beyond these formats.

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Keep up to date with the latest research your peers are reading and citing, with a collection of the most cited articles published in  Journal of Refugee Studies  in recent years. 

LGBTIQ+ Refugees Virtual Issue

The  Journal of Refugee Studies'   latest virtual issue brings together articles highlighting the progression of scholarly research on LGBTIQ+ refugees. 

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Browse our first virtual issue on unaccompanied minors

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Refugee studies on the OUPblog

• The important role of animals in refugee lives
• Performing for their lives: LGBT individuals seeking asylum
• Europe’s real refugee crisis: unaccompanied minors

View all articles by Khalid Koser on the OUPblog.

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This December 2023 issue features a special section exploring education for refugees.

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Forced Migration and Refugee Studies

Explore a collection of leading refugee studies research from Oxford University Press books, journals, and online resources. This collection covers a diverse breadth of regions and topics, including climate migrants, asylum policy in rich democracies, and the impact of COVID-19 on refugees. 

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PENN GLOBAL RESEARCH & ENGAGEMENT GRANT PROGRAM 2024 Grant Program Awardees

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In 2024, Penn Global will support 24 new faculty-led research and engagement projects at a total funding level of $1.5 million.

The Penn Global Research and Engagement Grant Program prioritizes projects that bring together leading scholars and practitioners across the University community and beyond to develop new insight on significant global issues in key countries and regions around the world, a core pillar of Penn’s global strategic framework. 

PROJECTS SUPPORTED BY THE HOLMAN AFRICA RESEARCH AND ENGAGEMENT FUND

• Global Medical Physics Training & Development Program  Stephen Avery, Perelman School of Medicine
• Developing a Dakar Greenbelt with Blue-Green Wedges Proposal  Eugenie Birch, Weitzman School of Design
• Emergent Judaism in Sub-Saharan Africa  Peter Decherney, School of Arts and Sciences / Sara Byala, School of Arts and Sciences
• Determinants of Cognitive Aging among Older Individuals in Ghana  Irma Elo, School of Arts and Sciences;  Iliana Kohler, School of Arts and Sciences
• Disrupted Aid, Displaced Lives Guy Grossman, School of Arts and Sciences
• A History of Regenerative Agriculture Practices from the Global South: Case Studies from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe Thabo Lenneiye, Kleinman Energy Center / Weitzman School of Design
• Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery Use in Botswana Public Schools Elizabeth Lowenthal, Perelman School of Medicine
• Podcasting South African Jazz Past and Present Carol Muller, School of Arts and Sciences
• Lake Victoria Megaregion Study: Joint Lakefront Initiative Frederick Steiner, Weitzman School of Design
• Leveraging an Open Source Software to Prevent and Contain AMR Jonathan Strysko, Perelman School of Medicine
• Poverty reduction and children's neurocognitive growth in Cote d'Ivoire Sharon Wolf, Graduate School of Education
• The Impacts of School Connectivity Efforts on Education Outcomes in Rwanda  Christopher Yoo, Carey Law School

PROJECTS SUPPORTED BY THE INDIA RESEARCH AND ENGAGEMENT FUND

• Routes Beyond Conflict: A New Approach to Cultural Encounters in South Asia  Daud Ali, School of Arts and Sciences
• Prioritizing Air Pollution in India’s Cities Tariq Thachil, Center for the Advanced Study of India / School of Arts and Sciences
• Intelligent Voicebots to Help Indian Students Learn English Lyle Ungar, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

PROJECTS SUPPORTED BT THE CHINA RESEARCH AND ENGAGEMENT FUND

• Planning Driverless Cities in China Zhongjie Lin, Weitzman School of Design

PROJECTS SUPPORTED BY THE GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT FUND 

• Education and Economic Development in Nepal Amrit Thapa, Graduate School of Education
• Explaining Climate Change Regulation in Cities: Evidence from Urban Brazil Alice Xu, School of Arts and Sciences
• Nurse Staffing Legislation for Scotland: Lessons for the U.S. and the U.K.  Eileen Lake, School of Nursing
• Pathways to Education Development & Their Consequences: Finland, Korea, US Hyunjoon Park, School of Arts and Sciences
• Engaged Scholarship in Latin America: Bridging Knowledge and Action Tulia Falleti, School of Arts and Sciences
• Organizing Migrant Communities to Realize Rights in Palermo, Sicily  Domenic Vitiello, Weitzman School of Design
• Exploiting Cultural Heritage in 21st Century Conflict   Fiona Cunningham, School of Arts and Sciences
• Center for Integrative Global Oral Health   Alonso Carrasco-Labra, School of Dental Medicine

This first-of-its-kind Global Medical Physics Training and Development Program (GMPTDP) seeks to serve as an opportunity for PSOM and SEAS graduate students to enhance their clinical requirement with a global experience, introduce them to global career opportunities and working effectively in different contexts, and strengthens partnerships for education and research between US and Africa. This would also be an exceptional opportunity for pre-med/pre-health students and students interested in health tech to have a hands-on global experience with some of the leading professionals in the field. The project will include instruction in automated radiation planning through artificial intelligence (AI); this will increase access to quality cancer care by standardizing radiation planning to reduce inter-user variability and error, decreasing workload on the limited radiation workforce, and shortening time to treatment for patients. GMPTDP will offer a summer clinical practicum to Penn students during which time they will also collaborate with UGhana to implement and evaluate AI tools in the clinical workflow.

The proposal will address today’s pressing crises of climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and growing economic disparities with a holistic approach that combines regional and small-scale actions necessary to achieve sustainability. It will also tackle a key issue found across sub-Saharan Africa, many emerging economies, and economically developed countries that struggle to control rapid unplanned urbanization that vastly outpaces the carrying capacity of the surrounding environment.

The regional portion of the project will create a framework for a greenbelt that halts the expansion of the metropolitan footprint. It will also protect the Niayes, an arable strip of land that produces over 80% of the country’s vegetables, from degradation. This partnership will also form a south-south collaboration to provide insights into best practices from a city experiencing similar pressures.

The small-scale portion of the project will bolster and create synergy with ongoing governmental and grassroots initiatives aimed at restoring green spaces currently being infilled or degraded in the capital. This will help to identify overlapping goals between endeavors, leading to collaboration and mobilizing greater funding possibilities instead of competing over the same limited resources. With these partners, we will identify and design Nature-based Solutions for future implementation.

Conduct research through fieldwork to examine questions surrounding Jewish identity in Africa. Research will be presented in e.g. articles, photographic images, and films, as well as in a capstone book. In repeat site-visits to Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, we will conduct interviews with and take photographs of stakeholders from key communities in order to document their everyday lives and religious practices.

The overall aim of this project is the development of a nationally representative study on aging in Ghana. This goal requires expanding our network of Ghanian collaborators and actively engage them in research on aging. The PIs will build on existing institutional contacts in Ghana that include:

1). Current collaboration with the Navrongo Health Research Center (NCHR) on a pilot data collection on cognitive aging in Ghana (funded by a NIA supplement and which provides the matching funds for this Global Engagement fund grant application);

2) Active collaboration with the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), University of Ghana. Elo has had a long-term collaboration with Dr. Ayaga Bawah who is the current director of RIPS.

In collaboration with UNHCR, we propose studying the effects of a dramatic drop in the level of support for refugees, using a regression discontinuity design to survey 2,500 refugee households just above and 2,500 households just below the vulnerability score cutoff that determines eligibility for full rations. This study will identify the effects of aid cuts on the welfare of an important marginalized population, and on their livelihood adaptation strategies. As UNHCR faces budgetary cuts in multiple refugee-hosting contexts, our study will inform policymakers on the effects of funding withdrawal as well as contribute to the literature on cash transfers.

The proposed project, titled "A History of Regenerative Agriculture Practices from the Global South: Case Studies from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe," aims to delve into the historical and contemporary practices of regenerative agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes:

1. Research Paper: The primary output of this project will be a comprehensive research paper. This paper will draw from a rich pool of historical and contemporary data to explore the history of regenerative agriculture practices in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. It will document the indigenous knowledge and practices that have sustained these regions for generations.

2. Policy Digest: In addition to academic research, the project will produce a policy digest. This digest will distill the research findings into actionable insights for policymakers, both at the national and international levels. It will highlight the benefits of regenerative agriculture and provide recommendations for policy frameworks that encourage its adoption.

3. Long-term Partnerships: The project intends to establish long-term partnerships with local and regional universities, such as Great Lakes University Kisumu, Kenya. These partnerships will facilitate knowledge exchange, collaborative research, and capacity building in regenerative agriculture practices. Such collaborations align with Penn Global's goal of strengthening institutional relationships with African partners.

The Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery (PCNB) was developed at the University of Pennsylvania by Dr. Ruben C. Gur and colleagues to be administered as part of a comprehensive neuropsychiatric assessment. Consisting of a series of cognitive tasks that help identify individuals’ cognitive strengths and weaknesses, it has recently been culturally adapted and validated by our team for assessment of school-aged children in Botswana . The project involves partnership with the Botswana Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD) to support the rollout of the PCNB for assessment of public primary and secondary school students in Botswana. The multidisciplinary Penn-based team will work with partners in Botswana to guide the PCNB rollout, evaluate fidelity to the testing standards, and track student progress after assessment and intervention. The proposed project will strengthen a well-established partnership between Drs. Elizabeth Lowenthal and J. Cobb Scott from the PSOM and in-country partners. Dr. Sharon Wolf, from Penn’s Graduate School of Education, is an expert in child development who has done extensive work with the Ministry of Education in Ghana to support improvements in early childhood education programs. She is joining the team to provide the necessary interdisciplinary perspective to help guide interventions and evaluations accompanying this new use of the PCNB to support this key program in Africa.

This project will build on exploratory research completed by December 24, 2023 in which the PI interviewed about 35 South Africans involved in jazz/improvised music mostly in Cape Town: venue owners, curators, creators, improvisers.

• Podcast series with 75-100 South African musicians interviewed with their music interspersed in the program.
• 59 minute radio program with extended excerpts of music inserted into the interview itself.
• Create a center of knowledge about South African jazz—its sound and its stories—building knowledge globally about this significant diasporic jazz community
• Expand understanding of “jazz” into a more diffuse area of improvised music making that includes a wide range of contemporary indigenous music and art making
• Partner w Lincoln Center Jazz (and South African Tourism) to host South Africans at Penn

This study focuses on the potential of a Megaregional approach for fostering sustainable development, economic growth, and social inclusion within the East African Community (EAC), with a specific focus on supporting the development of A Vision for An Inclusive Joint Lakefront across the 5 riparian counties in Kenya.

By leveraging the principles of Megaregion development, this project aims to create a unified socio-economic, planning, urbanism, cultural, and preservation strategy that transcends county boundaries and promotes collaboration further afield, among the EAC member countries surrounding the Lake Victoria Basin.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes:

1. Megaregion Conceptual Framework: The project will develop a comprehensive Megaregion Conceptual Framework for the Joint Lakefront region in East Africa. This framework, which different regions around the world have applied as a way of bridging local boundaries toward a unified regional vision will give the Kisumu Lake region a path toward cooperative, multi-jurisdictional planning. The Conceptual Framework will be both broad and specific, including actionable strategies, projects, and initiatives aimed at sustainable development, economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental stewardship.

2. Urbanism Projects: Specific urbanism projects will be proposed for key urban centers within the Kenyan riparian counties. These projects will serve as tangible examples of potential improvements and catalysts for broader development efforts.

3. Research Publication: The findings of the study will be captured in a research publication, contributing to academic discourse and increasing Penn's visibility in the field of African urbanism and sustainable development

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has emerged as a global crisis, causing more deaths than HIV/AIDS and malaria worldwide. By engaging in a collaborative effort with the Botswana Ministry of Health’s data scientists and experts in microbiology, human and veterinary medicine, and bioinformatics, we will aim to design new electronic medical record system modules that will:

Aim 1: Support the capturing, reporting, and submission of microbiology data from sentinel surveillance laboratories as well as pharmacies across the country

Aim 2: Develop data analytic dashboards for visualizing and characterizing regional AMR and AMC patterns

Aim 3: Submit AMR and AMC data to regional and global surveillance programs

Aim 4: Establish thresholds for alert notifications when disease activity exceeds expected incidence to serve as an early warning system for outbreak detection.

  Using a novel interdisciplinary approach that bridges development economics, psychology, and neuroscience, the overall goal of this project is to improve children's development using a poverty-reduction intervention in Cote d'Ivoire (CIV). The project will directly measure the impacts of cash transfers (CTs) on neurocognitive development, providing a greater understanding of how economic interventions can support the eradication of poverty and ensure that all children flourish and realize their full potential. The project will examine causal mechanisms by which CTs support children’s healthy neurocognitive development and learning outcomes through the novel use of an advanced neuroimaging tool, functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), direct child assessments, and parent interviews.

The proposed research, the GIGA initiative for Improving Education in Rwanda (GIER), will produce empirical evidence on the impact of connecting schools on education outcomes to enable Rwanda to better understand how to accelerate the efforts to bring connectivity to schools, how to improve instruction and learning among both teachers and students, and whether schools can become internet hubs capable of providing access e-commerce and e-government services to surrounding communities. In addition to evaluating the impact of connecting schools on educational outcomes, the research would also help determine which aspects of the program are critical to success before it is rolled out nationwide.

Through historical epigraphic research, the project will test the hypothesis that historical processes and outcomes in the 14th century were precipitated by a series of related global and local factors and that, moreover, an interdisciplinary and synergistic analysis of these factors embracing climatology, hydrology, epidemiology linguistics and migration will explain the transformation of the cultural, religious and social landscapes of the time more effectively than the ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm dominant in the field. Outputs include a public online interface for the epigraphic archive; a major international conference at Penn with colleagues from partner universities (Ghent, Pisa, Edinburgh and Penn) as well as the wider South Asia community; development of a graduate course around the research project, on multi-disciplinary approaches to the problem of Hindu-Muslim interaction in medieval India; and a public facing presentation of our findings and methods to demonstrate the path forward for Indian history. Several Penn students, including a postdoc, will be actively engaged.  

India’s competitive electoral arena has failed to generate democratic accountability pressures to reduce toxic air. This project seeks to broadly understand barriers to such pressures from developing, and how to overcome them. In doing so, the project will provide the first systematic study of attitudes and behaviors of citizens and elected officials regarding air pollution in India. The project will 1) conduct in-depth interviews with elected local officials in Delhi, and a large-scale survey of elected officials in seven Indian states affected by air pollution, and 2) partner with relevant civil society organizations, international bodies like the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), domain experts at research centers like the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), and local civic organizations (Janagraaha) to evaluate a range of potential strategies to address pollution apathy, including public information campaigns with highly affected citizens (PHFI), and local pollution reports for policymakers (Janagraaha).

The biggest benefit from generative AI such as GPT, will be the widespread availability of tutoring systems to support education. The project will use this technology to build a conversational voicebot to support Indian students in learning English. The project will engage end users (Indian tutors and their students) in the project from the beginning. The initial prototype voice-driven conversational system will be field-tested in Indian schools and adapted. The project includes 3 stages of development:

1) Develop our conversational agent. Specify the exact initial use case and Conduct preliminary user testing.

2) Fully localize to India, addressing issues identified in Phase 1 user testing.

3) Do comprehensive user testing with detailed observation of 8-12 students using the agent for multiple months; conduct additional assessments of other stakeholders.

The project partners with Ashoka University and Pratham over all three stages, including writing scholarly papers.

Through empirical policy analysis and data-based scenario planning, this project actively contributes to this global effort by investigating planning and policy responses to autonomous transportation in the US and China. In addition to publishing several research papers on this subject, the PI plans to develop a new course and organize a forum at PWCC in 2025. These initiatives are aligned with an overarching endeavor that the PI leads at the Weitzman School of Design, which aims to establish a Future Cities Lab dedicated to research and collaboration in the pursuit of sustainable cities.

This study aims to fill this gap through a more humanistic approach to measuring the impact of education on national development. Leveraging a mixed methods research design consisting of analysis of quantitative data for trends over time, observations of schools and classrooms, and qualitative inquiry via talking to people and hearing their stories, we hope to build a comprehensive picture of educational trends in Nepal and their association with intra-country development. Through this project we strive to better inform the efforts of state authorities and international organizations working to enhance sustainable development within Nepal, while concurrently creating space and guidance for further impact analyses. Among various methods of dissemination of the study’s findings, one key goal is to feed this information into writing a book on this topic.

Developing cities across the world have taken the lead in adopting local environmental regulation. Yet standard models of environmental governance begin with the assumption that local actors should have no incentives for protecting “the commons.” Given the benefits of climate change regulation are diffuse, individual local actors face a collective action problem. This project explores why some local governments bear the costs of environmental regulation while most choose to free-ride. The anticipated outputs of the project include qualitative data that illuminate case studies and the coding of quantitative spatial data sets for studying urban land-use. These different forms of data collection will allow me to develop and test a theoretical framework for understanding when and why city governments adopt environmental policy.

The proposed project will develop new insights on the issue of legislative solutions to the nurse staffing crisis, which will pertain to many U.S. states and U.K. countries. The PI will supervise the nurse survey data collection and to meet with government and nursing association stakeholders to plan the optimal preparation of reports and dissemination of results. The anticipated outputs of the project are a description of variation throughout Scotland in hospital nursing features, including nurse staffing, nurse work environments, extent of adherence to the Law’s required principles, duties, and method, and nurse intent to leave. The outcomes will be the development of capacity for sophisticated quantitative research by Scottish investigators, where such skills are greatly needed but lacking.  

The proposed project will engage multi-cohort, cross-national comparisons of educational-attainment and labor-market experiences of young adults in three countries that dramatically diverge in how they have developed college education over the last three decades: Finland, South Korea and the US. It will produce comparative knowledge regarding consequences of different pathways to higher education, which has significant policy implications for educational and economic inequality in Finland, Korea, the US, and beyond. The project also will lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration among the three country teams to seek external funding for sustained collaboration on educational analyses.

With matching funds from PLAC and CLALS, we will jointly fund four scholars from diverse LAC countries to participate in workshops to engage our community regarding successful practices of community-academic partnerships.

These four scholars and practitioners from Latin America, who are experts on community-engaged scholarship, will visit the Penn campus during the early fall of 2024. As part of their various engagements on campus, these scholars will participate after the workshops as key guest speakers in the 7th edition of the Penn in Latin America and the Caribbean (PLAC) Conference, held on October 11, 2024, at the Perry World House. The conference will focus on "Public and Community Engaged Scholarship in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their Diasporas."

Palermo, Sicily, has been a leading center of migrant rights advocacy and migrant civic participation in the twenty-first century. This project will engage an existing network of diverse migrant community associations and anti-mafia organizations in Palermo to take stock of migrant rights and support systems in the city. Our partner organizations, research assistants, and cultural mediators from different communities will design and conduct a survey and interviews documenting experiences, issues and opportunities related to various rights – to asylum, housing, work, health care, food, education, and more. Our web-based report will include recommendations for city and regional authorities and other actors in civil society. The last phase of our project will involve community outreach and organizing to advance these objectives. The web site we create will be designed as the network’s information center, with a directory of civil society and services, updating an inventory not current since 2014, which our partner Diaspore per la Pace will continue to update.

This interdisciplinary project has four objectives: 1) to investigate why some governments and non-state actors elevated cultural heritage exploitation (CHX) to the strategic level of warfare alongside nuclear weapons, cyberattacks, political influence operations and other “game changers”; 2) which state or non-state actors (e.g. weak actors) use heritage for leverage in conflict and why; and 3) to identify the mechanisms through which CHX coerces an adversary (e.g. catalyzing international involvement); and 4) to identify the best policy responses for non-state actors and states to address the challenge of CHX posed by their adversaries, based on the findings produced by the first three objectives.

Identify the capacity of dental schools, organizations training oral health professionals and conducting oral health research to contribute to oral health policies in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean region, identify the barriers and facilitators to engage in OHPs, and subsequently define research priority areas for the region in collaboration with the WHO, oral health academia, researchers, and other regional stakeholders.

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, reflections on solar energy adoption research: a semi-systematic review.

International Journal of Energy Sector Management

ISSN : 1750-6220

Article publication date: 3 May 2024

Research on solar energy adoption offers a multidimensional scope and warrants exploration from multiple perspectives, including political, economic, management, behavioral, policy and innovation aspects. The aim of this paper is to comprehensively consolidate major research findings on the premise of solar energy adoption and to disclose gaps in the existing literature.

Design/methodology/approach

A bibliometric analysis of the vast literature is conducted on 1,009 meticulously shortlisted articles following the semi-systematic literature review methodology. A text analytics tool named BibExcel is used for synthesizing the literature, and the results are visualized using Gephi, Pajek and a spreadsheet application.

This paper reports the evolution of research in the selected domain. It is noted that research in this domain was primarily concentrated on four broad themes, namely, peer effects and spatial patterns, public perceptions, policies and economics and technological evolution. The analysis further reveals the merging of two of these themes as a result of transdisciplinary research and also projects future research trends emphasizing political interventions in technological evolution and diffusion.

Originality/value

Research trends and future research scope are identified and discussed in detail. The information revealed from the analysis, along with the research implications, will assist policymakers in noting the flaws in the current doctrines and practices, entrepreneurs in understanding potential enablers and barriers influencing solar energy adoption and budding scholars in comprehending the current research status and framing promising research objectives to close the existing research gaps.

• Solar energy adoption
• Semi-systematic literature review
• Bibliometric analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Editor, Associate Editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions for enriching the quality of the paper. They also thank PGDM students of XIME Kochi from the Operations Management specialization for assisting in retrieving relevant data from the WoS platform.

Declarations .

Funding: No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Data availability: Data will be made available on request.

C.R., V. and John, J. (2024), "Reflections on solar energy adoption research: a semi-systematic review", International Journal of Energy Sector Management , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJESM-01-2024-0028

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