School of Education

The award is a highly competitive recognition, attracting submissions from emerging researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

 

Samira’s research explores how peace can be understood and communicated through art and shared creative expression, particularly in intercultural and multilingual contexts. Developed in collaboration with Dilara Özel Sen and Sevinj Rustamova, the Silent Path to Peace workshop, delivered as part of the UNESCO RIELA Spring School, brought together participants from diverse backgrounds to express their understanding of peace through visual art. The research highlights the potential of non-verbal, arts-based approaches to foster empathy, inclusion and intercultural dialogue, creating space for shared meaning-making beyond language barriers. The work contributes to growing interest in innovative and inclusive methodologies within peace education, particularly in contexts shaped by cultural and linguistic diversity.

 

Professor Alison Phipps, Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies and UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts, said:

“It’s rare, over the span of an academic career, to have a PhD student win such a prestigious award, at such a prestigious conference, of ‘Best Paper.’ Samira and Dilara are to be warmly congratulated on the bold, tenacious and determined scholarship, which has upended much of the given assumptions about Peace Education and International Relations and brought the groundings of everyday peace and of children’s difficult visions into view. We, in the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts are immensely proud of her, as am I as her academic supervisor.”