The REF-ARAB Project - Team - Mirjam Twigt
Mirjam Twigt is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo. She holds a PhD in Media, Communication and Sociology from University of Leicester, UK. Mirjam was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Council for British Research in the Levant Research Fellow, based at the British Institute of Amman in 2018 – 2019. The findings of her PhD and postdoctoral research will be published in a forthcoming monograph on the roles of communication technologies in everyday experiences of Iraqi refugees residing in prolonged displacement in Amman, Jordan.
Her research in the REF-ARAB project will focus on digital refugee lawyering. It aims to further comprehend the potentials and challenges of communication technologies for UNHCR personnel, local legal aid organizations, people working for (I)NGOs and community leaders for refugee lawyering. Second, it considers how these practices work out in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KR-I). More than 98 % of all registered refugees in Iraq are based in this autonomous region. As of January 2020, UNHCR Iraq had registered 283,022 refugees of whom 247,770 are Syrian nationals.
How does digital refugee lawyering interact with the actual experiences of those refugees residing in the KR-I in need of legal aid?