The ways of thinking and knowing developed in Indigenous cultures have long been marginalised within the academy and in public life, including in approaches to the environment, migration, and justice. Dr June Bam–Hutchison (University of Cape Town) is leading a collaborative network that aims to restore understandings of Indigenous concepts, enrich existing scholarship, and help to develop new approaches to today’s global challenges.

Public debates about marriage migration are vulnerable to a series of misconceptions, often conflating migration with trafficking and undermining the agency of the women who migrate. The WUN Marriage Migrants in Asia research group is addressing these misconceptions with interdisciplinary research that aims to inform regional policy. Click through to read more about their activities and the thinking behind them.

WUN is pleased to announce an internship opportunity for a doctoral researcher at IOM GMDAC in Berlin.

“Exploring resilient peacebuilding actors, cultures and policy transfer in West Africa”.

Open: call for research proposals on Marriage Migrants and Care, deadline 15 March 2019. 

Implementing the SDGs in East Africa: Translating collaborative research into policy impact.

WUN academic workshop report: The Shiloh Project In Ghana. An Intersectional Exploration of Religion and Gender-Based Violence.

What does mobile phone usage in Africa and small-town hospitality to queer people in South Africa reveal about globalisation as it’s encountered in the margins and peripheries?

WUN Understanding Cultures Global Challenge Workshop: how heritage can help people deal with trauma of forced and unsafe migration 

The Worldwide Universities Network Global Policy Research Group (WUN GPRG) was launched (stage 1) at Renmin University of China (RUC) on 24 March 2018 during the RUC-WUN Think Tank Conference.

Digital technologies enable the creation of personal connection with Holocaust survivors.

On 24th March 2018, the RUC-WUN Think Tank Summit will be held on the campus of Renmin University. Springtime Beijing and Renmin University of China welcome experts and colleagues from WUN partner universities.

First stage of ongoing progress to develop a “one-stop-shop” for international data

CUHK announces the launch of the world’s first Child Heritage Chinese Language Corpus and the establishment of the University of Cambridge–CUHK Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism.

Professor Jill Walker Rettberg studies how humans use technology and what it means to us as a culture.

There’s increasing recognition within science, engineering and medicine that arts and humanities involvement in development projects is essential,

Migration governance continues to fail in several key areas such as labour rights, employment opportunities and social protection.

CUHK forms tri-continental partnership with the University of Toronto and Utrecht University for innovative solutions on urban issues

On 2-7 April, close to 400 academics and university leaders from around the world will descend on Maastricht for the WUN Conference & AGM 2016, hosted by Maastricht University.

The research community know little about the new types of immigration in the world. A new, international project seeks to find the answers to difficult questions in the migration debate.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) recently launched the Global China Research Program with the goal of understanding China’s global presence and international relations, as well as the global reception of China’s outward engagements. 

Much like the printing press, the invention of the world wide web has afforded us unprecedented opportunities for spreading information. Not only do we now have the capacity to share rich data sets online, we also have vast amounts of data about our online activity. However, without a proper framework in place, it is difficult to take full advantage of this rich information resource. There are currently multiple barriers to using this resource effectively, including accessibility of datasets, lack of comprehensive and shareable metadata, dataset identification and searching, access control and privileges, and analytics.

The local and the global have become entangled in rural and peri-urban areas, not only in South Africa, but around the world. And understanding these entanglements is the aim of the the WUN-sponsored project Understanding Globalisation – Margins and Peripheries. This project, led by Associate Professor Ana Deumert, seeks to study globalisation in the so-called margins of the world system: areas never before considered to be heavily affected by globalisation, but which are increasingly shaped by larger social and cultural processes.

As the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, battle it out for superpower status, the Indian Ocean is growing in prominence as a key geopolitical region. But human memory is short when compared with the history of humankind. Archaeological evidence has unearthed a number of insights indicating that this Indian Ocean connection has been a key region of cultural interaction and trade for approximately 2,000 years.

The mission of WUN is twofold: to support international research collaboration and to foster the next generation of researchers. It appears to have accomplished both in regard to two PhD students who have recently published a joint paper in a special issue of the Journal of Asian Social Work and Policy Review.

How did African plants and animals get to India? The Indian Ocean Archaeology Network is uncovering the long-term history of trade and interaction across this geopolitical corridor.

From climate change to improving public health, the world’s 350 million Indigenous people share a number of urgent challenges in common. Yet while many Indigenous groups are actively involved in forging solutions to the issues they face, there are surprisingly few organisations dedicated to disseminating and sharing their insights.

Since the adoption of the “go global” strategy in the early 2000s, China’s total outward foreign direct investment (FDI) stock has increased from US$30 billion to US$610 billion in 2014. The Economist estimates that the flow of Chinese outward investment will be US$264 billion in 2017 alone. Although China remains a relatively new player in outward FDI, this rapidly expanding flow of capital represents a host of opportunities and challenges for policy-makers, businesses and researchers.

Geographers at the University of Southampton have developed a new way to measure the ‘health’ of poor regional communities.  They aim to improve the wellbeing of people by guiding sustainable development practices to help avoid social and environmental collapse.