News & articles

The OU is just starting its ‘Year of Mygration’ 2018, highlighting the ways in which the university is open not only to places, people and methods, but also the ways in which these are all implicated in mobility and migration.

The leading neurological surgeon in Germany, Dr (later Sir) Ludwig Guttmann came to Oxford in March 1939 as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis.

As we come towards the end of our month of contributions on being ‘Open to People’, it is time to reflect on the Open University’s consistent highlighting of migration’s underlying issues.

The power of learning analytics to predict the best learning approach for students, was outlined by Bart Rienties in his inaugural lecture on Tuesday 30 January 2018.

The government-commissioned Farmer Review warned in 2016 that the UK construction industry was “facing challenges that have not been seen before”. In no uncertain terms, it called for major industry-wide change. The “overwhelming risks” foreseen in the review sadly seem to have come to pass.

Oscar Gakuo Mwangi, University of Lesotho, argues in Understanding Statelessness, edited by Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (Routledge 2017), that statelessness in the Kenyan context needs to be seen as simultaneously a psychological and a physical condition determined by spatial-political boundaries rather than legal ones.

One way of reflecting on our theme of being ‘Open to People’ on or around Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, is to listen to the voices of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the British Library’s collection, freely available to anyone.

The Open University (OU) is to play a lead role in the creation and running of the UK’s first Institute of Coding, announced this week

All over the world this evening, 25 January, there are Burns’ Night suppers celebrating the poetry of the eighteenth century Robert Burns who never left Scotland.

A colleague who recently heard me present my research on the role of migrant staff as brokers in migrant support and advocacy organisations, asked me if I didn’t understand myself as a kind of broker too. Wasn’t I as an academic (and migrant) also in the role of a conveyor and translator of different knowledges?