RLI seminars online

Last night the Refugee Law Initiative and CSEL hosted the last in our series of seminars on psychology and seeking asylum. It was well attended and we enjoyed interesting discussions - with the speakers and the audience. Now videos of the first two seminars are available online (with instructions on how to download the audio files). The rest will follow, so watch this space.

Putting Evidence into Practice

This month I started work on our new dissemination project, Evidence into Practice, funded by Comic Relief and focusing particularly on reaching legal professionals with CSEL's psychological research findings. The project will run for three years, and will have a similar structure to the Women's Research Dissemination project: as before we'll be running 2-3 training sessions each year, publishing articles in relevant journals, delivering conference presentations, and developing CSEL's overall dissemination capacity in order to reach more legal professionals than we can reach directly through our training.

Evidence into Practice will also feature some exciting new plans and ways of working:

·       We will focus more particularly on legal professionals than we have before, with a commitment to in-house training for lawyers, as well as training for legal workers (including potentially caseworkers) in the voluntary sector.

·       Our commitments also include dedicated follow-up sessions for training participants to support ongoing use of CSEL's research findings.

·       The project will develop our communications infrastructure and capacity – we'll be recruiting a communications intern later this year (watch this space!)

·       Further down the line we'll be organising a forum or roundtable event to explore the involvement of refugee women in research into refugee women's issues, looking at the ethics and practicalities of participation and involvement.

At the moment, I'm in the research phase: talking to lawyers and caseworkers about what information they need from CSEL and how to deliver it to make it most useful; finding out more about the legal services available to women seeking asylum and who's providing them; re-evaluating our existing training. Phase 2 will involve designing the project's training seminar, and planning the delivery of the project over the next 3 years. Hopefully the first training seminar will be delivered in early summer.

Are you a lawyer or caseworker working with women seeking asylum? If so, I'd love to hear from you: I'm looking for suggestions as to law firms, law centres, and regions of the UK where we can take our training, and suggestions as to essential content to include in the training – or, indeed, non-essential content we can discard from training seminars! If you'd be willing to be contacted as part of my project research and planning, please get in touch with me.

Meanwhile, don't forget you can download our current training manual with summaries of some of our research from our website.

Clare Cochrane

Evidence into Practice project manager

DON'T MISS THE LAST SEMINAR...

... in our joint seminar series with the Refugee Law Initiative!

On Tuesday evening, Feb. 26th,  Professor Chris Brewin will present  cutting edge science on psychological trauma and memory.  Dr Stuart Turner will show how this work is crucial to making high quality decisions about people seeking state protection.  Judge Catriona Jarvis will share her responses to the presentations and reflections on this approach to refugee decision making.  Click here for details and to join us.