Prof Sara Kindon
Professor Sara Kindon from Victoria University Wellington - School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences was a visiting research fellow with the University of Glasgow UNESCO RILA team from 1-30 September 2018. She combined her visit with participation in the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers’ Annual Conference where she convened three paper sessions on the Geographies of Refugee Resettlement with colleagues Dr Polly Stupples and Ms Amber Kale.
During her visit, Sara presented her geographic research questioning the place of place in New Zealand’s refugee resettlement strategy to the Glasgow Refugee and Migrant Network (GRAMNet) and the University of Edinburgh’s Geography Department. She wrote a number of poems, two of which have now been published in Funtunfunefu ‘Synched’: One Hundred and One Poems (edited by Gameli Tordzro), which was dedicated to the victims of the Christchurch terrorists attacks in March 2019. Sara also participated in a community forum focusing on Emotions, Solidarity and Action with Drs Kye Askins and Heather McClean at Govenhill Baths sharing her insights from sustained activism with Indigenous Maori and refugee-background students over 20 years.
Sara was joined for part of her stay by her Masters (now doctoral) student, Ms Amber Kale. Together they presented on arts-based methods within the Testing Grounds seminar (Department of Geography, University of Glasgow). This seminar integrated Sara’s cross-cultural research using participatory photography and textiles with Amber’s use of participatory painting to explore the opportunities and limitations of these methods for engaging former refugees to generate more embodied ways of knowing. They also presented to the Universities of Newcastle and Northumbria on a paper from Amber’s Honours research into gender, (im)mobility and citizenship in a refugee women’s driving programme. This paper will be published in Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography in 2021.
Sara’s stay enabled the development of her new VUW postgraduate course: Refugee Spaces, launched in 2020, which explores the relationships between emotions, embodiment and space from the moment of forced displacement to refugee resettlement. Sara was also able to deepen her relationship with Professor Phipps who, in 2019, she then invited to give a public lecture in Wellington, and contribute knowledge from Scotland to the Learning Together in Aotearoa Forum. At this Forum, Professor Phipps was part of an action-oriented day, which led to the establishment of a new National Tertiary Network to Support Refugee-Background Students, and facebook group.
While Sara was with the UNESCO RILA team, she was held beautifully by the hospitality, poetry, stories and music of Tawona Sithole and Dr Gameli Todzro – including a dembe drumming session. She also explored the symbolism and significance of textiles with Naa Densua Todzro, which contributed to Sara’s ongoing research using Chilean tapestries (arpilleras) with Latin American former refugee and migrant women living in Wellington. Over her weeks in residence, Sara also enjoyed learning of the international work of Dr Giovanna Fassetta and meeting colleagues in other parts of the School of Education. She particularly appreciated the administrative support of Bella Hoogeveen and Lauren Roberts.
Sara is a Professor of Human Geography and Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (VUW). A concern for equity informs her teaching, research and community engagement, and she is best known for her work on democratising methodologies particularly through participatory action research (PAR) and participatory video. Since 2005, she has used PAR with refugee background communities – particularly young people – and postgraduate students to explore key issues in resettlement including; access to and success within education, health and wellbeing, employment, sports, gender and belonging. She is also the Coordinator of the VUW Network to Support Refugee Background Students, which was established out of recommendations from the first PAR project carried out at VUW in 2006. Through this role, and the research supporting it, she and colleagues have changed University equity policy to include refugee background students, created targeted scholarships and most recently, established a Refugee Background Students Advisor position. Since 2019, she is also leading the establishment of a national tertiary education network to support refugee background Students. She loves working cross-culturally and multi-lingually and prior to taking up her professional position at VUW, lived and worked in the UK, Spain, Costa Rica, Canada, and Indonesia.
For more information about Sara and her research, please visit her staff page.