Social Sciences Hub
Date: Monday 27 October 2025 - Friday 31 October 2025
Time: 8:00 - 19:00
Venue: Online
Category: Conferences, Public lectures, Academic events, Student events, Alumni events
Speaker: Alison Phipps, Naomi Head, Bilgin Ayata, Luigi Toscano, Matt Rabagliati, Shira Klein, Ramon Ayres and many more

The UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating is an event organised by the UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Languages, and Arts (in short UNESCO RIELA) at the University of Glasgow. The event is bi-annual, with an in person edition during the Northern Hemisphere Spring in May in Glasgow, Scotland, and an online edition during the Southern Hemisphere Spring in October.

Every year there is a specific focus and this year the theme is 'May Peace Prevail'. We will be looking at peacebuilding, specifically using arts, languages and education. We have curated a programme which explores how to build peace in the minds of people, how to live together peacefully, restoratively and interculturally, how to respond to and counteract current events worldwide that seek to divide societies, and how to ensure that peace prevails, founded on justice.

In so doing we acknowledge that to even contemplate peace when colleagues and friends in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially in Gaza, Sudan, Tigray, Ukraine and Lebanon (full list of armed conflicts available here) are experiencing genocide and war crimes of the most horrifying nature is, in itself, a luxury. We are seeing many of the international agreements and conventions which bind our work in the UNESCO Chair, at the University of Glasgow, in shreds and our own critical discussions mean that we have lost much faith, even the little we may have had, in peace-building initiatives. We see our work at present as requiring a degree of resignation from the violent structures which have now comprehensively failed. To work alongside those who should have been offered international refugee protection such that their lives and the conditions for their dignity and life might have been restored is now very much our urgent task. But how to do this when we are grieving tangible and intangible losses on so many levels? What sustains the work of peacebuilding and conflict transformation when language fails, when art is mourning, when grief is raw and critical capacities struggle to make any sense of the world?

And yet – this is our task as people of intellect. And study. And Art. And education. So, what might we say when words fail, when resignation is a necessary task, when forms which held hope no longer exist or are themselves destituted of all power?

Sub-topics we will explore:

  • Non-violent strategies to prevent hatred, wars, and violent conflicts, we are especially interested in strategies that include languages and/or arts.
  • Examples by community groups/organisations where peacebuilding is part of the integration methodology: what are the difficulties and best practices?
  • Researching “peacebuilding”, how to deal with research-related issues (access to conflict areas, cultural representation, story extraction etc.).
  • Educating the next generation of peacebuilders: bearing witness and passing on knowledge, approaches to integrate peacebuilding and conflict resolution into school curricula.
  • When peace is not your daily reality, what can be done? Methods for using art to preserve the socio-cultural memory of people affected by conflict and to support mental health.
  • Strategies for creating spaces for reconciliation and dialogue, creative art approaches to facilitate healing in post-conflict societies.
  • Critical perspectives on liberal peacebuilding, on securitisation and theoretical models, routed in praxis, for enabling peace to prevail, perspectives from people with lived experience of conflict and persecution.

Read the full programme here.

More information