Harvard University and the University of Athens held an online signing event on Wednesday, January 19 to officially launch their memorandum of co-operation for a new Refugee and Migration Studies Hub in Greece.
According to ANSA Med, Harvard graduate students will take part in an inter-disciplinary course on migration and refugee issues from July 11-31 in Athens, Nafplio and the island of Lesvos.
The course will be offered by Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, in collaboration with the University of Athens’ Refugee and Migration Studies Hub, and will include lectures, seminars, interactive class sessions and fieldwork.
The US Deputy Ambassador to Greece, David Burger, has welcomed the initiative.
“We will be looking forward to learning from our colleagues in Greece, the faculty, staff and students, who will join the projects and the initiatives of the Hub. And, importantly, we need to learn from the refugees and migrants themselves. Their voices must be part of this process,” Mr Burger said.
Greek Education Minister, Niki Kerameus, also lauded the initiative.
“Despite the pandemic, we are promoting the international collaborations of our universities with a firm commitment to consolidating their extroversion and claiming the position they deserve in the International Academic Charter,” Ms Kerameus said.
Greece has been on the frontline of Europe’s migration crisis since it erupted in 2015, when nearly a million people fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan landed on its islands in the Aegean Sea, as well as its northern land borders with Turkey.
Source: ANSA Med.
