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19.11.2025
Institutskolloquium IfP (26.11.25) – The “Refugee Crisis” in Europe: Voluntary and Community Sector Responses from the North East of England
Speaker: Georgia Dimitriou, T@T Fellow, Durham University
Wednesday, November 26th 2025, 16:00 c.t. / Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft or online via Zoom
About the lecture: In 2015 many refugees were entering Europe, fleeing conflicts and political instability around the world. Policymakers, politicians and the media referred to this as the “refugee crisis”. In this talk she will present the three different Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) groups she found to be operating in the North East of England and trace the different forms of solidarity they engaged in during the “refugee crisis” in Europe and its aftermath. The VCS in the UK has always been filling in the gaps of welfare state provision through civic solidarity, however the 2008 austerity cuts significantly influenced the sector’s responses. She will argue that pre-existing infrastructure survived austerity by establishing new partnerships. The growing demand for services from the increasing number of people in the region from 2015 onwards also led to the founding of new charities and the churches redirecting their aims. The most prominent forms of solidarity in the context of the VCS in the North East are civic solidarity and institutional solidarity, which co-existed to different extents across these different groups operating in the region.
Georgia Dimitriou is currently a Teach@Tübingen Fellow at the University of Tübingen. She holds a master’s in philosophy and a PhD in Government and International Relations from Durham University, where she was an A.G. Leventis Scholar in the School of Government and International Affairs. Her doctoral research examined the intersection between vulnerability, austerity and refugee resettlement, focusing on the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme in the North East of England. She is now in the process of adapting this research into a monograph, as well as looking into ways she can offer fresh insight into the practice of resettlement contributing to the support and improvement of the everyday living experiences of refugee communities.
Previously, Georgia was also a tutor of Politics and Social Sciences at Durham University International Study Centre, where she coordinated and delivered Contemporary Issues in Politics and International Relations, Human Culture and Diversity, Research Methods for Social Science, Extended Research and Critical Reading and Applied Academic Writing Skills.
The lecture will be held in English