Forced displacement and other human migration crises raise complex interacting issues about nation-states, laws, borders, human rights, citizenship and identity, security, resource allocation, and information and communication technologies (ICT).  Integral to this complexity, documentation and particularly official records are pervasive and fundamental yet somehow rarely conspicuous.  Much attention has been focused on official verification of identities and citizenship of displaced persons and other migrants, vetting them for security risks, reunifying families, and determining whether or not they qualify for asylum and resettlement. However the issues that asylum seekers and other migrants confront in understanding, accessing, carrying, preserving and producing the kinds of authoritative documentation required for these as well as other bureaucratic processes in their future lives remain under-addressed.

This one-day symposium at the University Department of Croatian Studies (University of Zagreb) is one of a series of workshops taking place across the globe in 2018 to highlight issues linked to records and other documentation for refugees and asylum seekers. The symposium is organized by ICARUS-HR and the University Department of Croatian Studies (University of Zagreb) in collaboration with the Refugee Rights in Records Project of the UCLA Department of Information Studies’ Centre for Information as Evidence (UCLA CIE) and the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies (LUCAS).

More information about the project can be found at  https://informationasevidence.org/refugee-rights-in-records.

One of the goals of this symposium is to bring together speakers from a range of backgrounds to promote awareness, dialogue and initiative on topics including the following:

• Issues faced by child and women migrants and relating to family separation/reunification
• Coping with trauma and health concerns
• Education and literacy concerns and initiatives
• Classification considerations and more existential dilemmas about personal identity
• Support infrastructure for personal recordkeeping
• Development of a platform to ensure personal rights in and to bureaucratic records
• Documenting and archiving current and historical personal and community displacement and diaspora experiences
• Designing and implementing information technology to address specific humanitarian needs.

To register to attend, please email: info.icarushr[at]gmail.hr.

Working languages of the Symposium are English and Croatian.