Dr Gul Innac
Dr. Gül İNANÇ is a lecturer at the School of Art, Design Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her areas of interest and expertise include amongst diplomatic history of West Asia, history education and intercultural education for peace. Her recent published work focuses amongst others on intercultural and global cultural heritage education for peace and conflict resolution. She is the founding director of Opening Universities for Refugees (OUR), which is an independent initiative to build knowledge networks and consortia to offer higher education to communities in need. is designed to help meet the higher educational needs of communities in protracted refugee/displacement situations globally. Amongst others, the initiative seeks to enhance international awareness and understanding of the need to contribute to the higher education of refugees and displaced people. Moreover, it brings together institutions which offer, or are willing to offer, higher education courses and/or diploma and certificate programs to refugees and displaced peoples.
Dr. İnanç will be introducing her new co-authored book Access to Higher Education, Refugees’ Stories from Malaysia which has recently been published by Routledge and will talk about the current refugee situation in South East Asia region as well as how we can offer support to the education of the displaced communities from Singapore.
The Senior School Library hosted Dr Gül Īnanç as a guest speaker in the Coffee and Conversations with an Author Series. Gül, a lecturer at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, introduced her new co-authored book Access to Higher Education, Refugees’ Stories from Malaysia.
Until 2015, no refugees in Malaysia were able to access higher education, and they were unable to attend government schooling. Since then, six private higher education institutions have agreed to open their doors to refugees for the first time.
Gül’s book contains stories from a small group of successful refugees in Malaysia, who have managed to receive higher education in a country that neither recognizes that they exist nor offers them even basic education. It identifies the factors that aided their success and charts the challenges that they and their communities have faced.
Gül spoke about the current refugee situation in South East Asia region as well as how we can offer support to the education of the displaced communities from Singapore.
Gül has founded a charity registered in the UK called Opening Universities for Refugees (OUR) whose goal is to build knowledge networks and consortia to offer higher education to communities in need. OUR brings together institutions that offer, and are willing to offer, higher education courses and/or diploma and certificate programs to people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds. OUR’s principal aim is to create an open knowledge network, accessible by all, to push for better educational opportunities and outcomes for people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds
Gül also worked with our Year 12 IB History students, focusing on informing them about the current refugee crisis, discussing ways to humanize the problem and considering the impact of historical refugee crises on current policy-making.