FIELDWORK AMONG REFUGEES IN GREECE – Available internships for students in 2023

Northern Lights Aid (NLA) is an international voluntary organisation based in the town of Kavala in northern Greece. The purpose of the organisation is to improve the quality of life of refugees staying in the country. We would like to invite students at NTNU to an educational and meaningful effort for NLA, as a possible part of their bachelor or master degree.

Several programme areas at NTNU offer practical training courses/stays, and NLA would like to be a partner. The fieldwork may fall under the Erasmus scheme – see attached documentation (Appendix 1), which shows that this has already been the case at universities in other European countries.

In connection with internships at a solidarity organisation that we offer here, it is important to be aware of the ethical dilemmas raised by any research projects in the field. Performing academic work that directly involves vulnerable groups of people through interviews, etc., could violate the NLA's guidelines.

 An internship at NLA primarily involves work experience and perspectives that will benefit the student as important contributions in their further course of study and career. Examples of the range of the topics studied up to now are shown in Appendix 1 and 2, and can be the organisation of humanitarian relief efforts, how to achieve a dignified and effective distribution, the cooperation between different NGOs, how to improve the logistics of aid work, fundraising, the asylum system in theory and practice, and provide experience-based basis for scientific publication in peer-reviewed journals (see examples from the publication list of PhD student Henrik Kjellmo Larsen, Appendix 2).

Relevant subject areas for students offered practice in the field may be social anthropology, sociology, social geography, political science, migration studies, international relations, English teaching/didactics, pedagogy, psychology, logistics, economics, as well as cultural and development studies.

If this is of interest, NLA President Rachel Bromell is pleased to be contacted. Bromell has updated knowledge about the organising of daily work in Kavala, and how this can be combined with university studies. She and the other team of international volunteers want to facilitate the fulfilment of a tripartite contract, including by setting aside time for report writing and guidance from the department with which the practice students are affiliated.

Bromell can be contacted by phone +44 7936 435892, email: rachel@northernlightsaid.org

 At several educational institutions, collaboration with NLA and similar NGOs has already been a success. People mentioned include Heidi Mogstad and Henrik Kjellmo Larsen from Norway. Their fieldwork in Greece has subsequently led to scientific publications and academic degrees. For Mogstad's part, this entails a recently completed PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge (autumn 2021). And for Henrik Kjellmo Larsen, one of the NLA's founders, the fieldwork has resulted in a master degree in development studies, as well as ongoing work on a doctoral thesis in sociology, at Monash University in Australia (see Appendix 2). As regards NLA volunteers' other experiences from practice work in recent years, we refer to the attached statements from students at the University of Leeds, Sciences Po Paris, American University of Paris and Glasgow University (see Appendix 1).

At the latter university, the combination of practical training and fieldwork for NLA resulted in a master degree, completed in 2020. Manon Louis-Puttick examined the volunteers' experiences, and how these helped establish new attitudes and understandings of being on the run. In addition to the rich academic and personal benefits that she explains in her statement in Appendix 1, it can be mentioned that her master thesis received a "First", and that she has subsequently won the "Professor John Briggs Award", as well as being nominated for the prestigious award from the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group in the United Kingdom.

Attached you can find more information about Northern Lights Aid (Appendix 3).

You can fill out the volunteer form here: Register as a volunteer (google.com)

Sincerely,
Kari Ronge
International volunteer for NLA since 2019, based in Norway
+ 4791159243
karironge1@gmail.com

Kaja Guttormsgaard
Logistic Coordinator for NLA and internship placement with the French university Sciences Po Paris
+4748602826
kaja.guttormsgaard@gmail.com