New Frontiers Conference 2025

New Frontiers: Inter-disciplinary Research on Refugee Children and Youth. An International Conference

Reykjavík, Iceland
31.10 – 1.11 2025

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Important dates

February 1, 2025 Open for submissions

April 22, 2025 Abstract submission deadline  (Extended)

June 1, 2025 Review results

June 1, 2025 Registration opens

August 20, 2025 Deadline for Early bird registration

August 20, 2025 Deadline for presenters’ registration

October 24, 2025 Registration deadline (Extended deadline)

Oct 31 – Nov, 1 2025 Conference (two full days)

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About the Project
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About the Conference

The University of Iceland is pleased to announce the call for papers for a conference „New Frontiers“ on refugees and asylum seekers with a special focus on the experience of children and youth.

The organizers of this conference are a team of inter-disciplinary scholars who received a major, multi-year grant from the Icelandic Research Fund to research the inclusion of resettlement refugees from Syria and Iraq who arrived in Iceland between 2016–2021 with special attention on the children and youth. Among the topics that this project explores are second-language acquisition, education, well-being, social networks, trust, and access to resources and services.

At this conference we would like to explore the comparative dimensions of the refugee experience and evaluate how this question has manifested itself in different settings around the world. We encourage papers that address different aspects from the cultural, political, social, religious, and economic perspectives. We also welcome papers on other relevant themes pertinent to refugees and border crossers from different disciplines including education, history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, politics, media, the visual arts and literature as well as inter-disciplinary studies.

The conference will be held in Reykjavik on October 31st and November 1st, 2025 and will include keynote talks and pre-organized panels on refugees and border crossers in Iceland.

Policy statement

The voices and experiences of refugee children and youth are the core of the conference „New Frontiers“. We bring together international research on refugee children and youth as well as personal accounts of refugees and immigrants in Iceland, where the conference takes place. By facilitating interdisciplinary scientific exchange on these matters, we aim to advance the global conversation on the inclusion, equity and social justice for internally and externally displaced children and young people – an imperative in light of ongoing and devastating human rights crises worldwide. 

The Conference follows the general guidelines of the University of Iceland for academic conferences and the University’s principles of academic freedom and speech as well as the guidelines  of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) in its policies on attendance from Israeli institutions. 

Keynote speakers

Gry Paulgaard

Gry Paulgaard is Dr.Polit. in Pedagogics and Professor emeritus at the Department of Teacher Education & Pedagogics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Northern Norway, campus Tromsø.

Her scholarly interests include geography of education; implying the importance of contextualization of educational research, globalization and uneven development between center and periphery; particularly focusing on how young people growing up in northern areas live their lives, experience their opportunities for education and work, and the ‘choices’ they have.

In recent years, after 2015, much of her research has focused on migration, refugee education and integration of young people and families in rural places, particularly in the rural north of Norway. She is also the head of the research group ICred – Intercultural Relations in Education – at UiT the Arctic University of Norway.

Read the abstract

Laura Robson

Laura Robson is Professor in the Department of History and the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. She is a scholar of international and Middle Eastern history, with a special interest in questions of refugeedom, forced migration, and statelessness. 

Her most recent books are The League of Nations (with Joseph Maiolo; Cambridge, 2025), a reconsideration of the meaning and import of this first experiment in formal internationalism, and Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (Verso, 2023), a wide-ranging investigation of the many twentieth century schemes to deploy refugees as labor migrants across the globe. She is also the author of The Politics of Mass Violence in the Middle East (Oxford, 2020); States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (University of California, 2017); and Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas, 2011), as well as the editor of Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (with Arie Dubnov; Stanford, 2019) and Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives (Syracuse, 2016). 

With Jennifer Dueck, she is a co-founder and co-editor of StatelessHistories.org, a digital humanities project exploring the varied and multifaceted experiences of statelessness in the modern era. 

Read the abstract

The ESRCI Project

The New Frontiers conference builds on insights from the ongoing research project Education and Social Inclusion of Refugee Children and Youth in Iceland (ESRCI). Funded by the Icelandic Research Fund, the ESRCI project investigates the experiences of Syrian and Iraqi resettlement refugees in Iceland, focusing on children and youth and their inclusion in education, language acquisition, social life, and access to services

ESRCI Website

Pedagogy in Times of Uncertainty: Refugees in the Nordic Regions, Navigating New Landscapes.

Gry Paulgaard

Preliminary abstract

Paulgaard’s research interests included globalization, center-periphery dynamics, geography of education, and cultural identities. In autumn 2015, when refugees from 35 nations arrived in a northern Norwegian municipality via the Arctic Migration Route, she began studying their resettlement experiences. These refugees crossed Europe’s northernmost Schengen border, the border between Russia and northern Norway. This Arctic Migration Route, situated above the 69th parallel north, offered an alternative to the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossings for those seeking safety and protection.

Her speech will explore how refugees navigate new and often unfamiliar landscapes, emphasizing the role of education, local practices, and collective memories. By integrating theories of place-based experiences with phenomenology of practice, she will highlight the local impact of global conflicts in northern regions. Drawing on interviews with refugee families, young people, local authorities, teachers, and volunteers, she will discuss the sensory and emotional aspects of resettlement, including feelings of orientation and disorientation, and how place-based experiences, climate, and culture influence refugee integration in new environments.

Based on collaboration with her Danish colleague, Dr. Lisa Herslund, she will demonstrate that despite several differences between Norwegian and Danish rural areas in terms of distance, climate, and population density, the experiences of young refugees reveal surprisingly many similarities. This collaboration opened opportunities to analyze how differences are shaped through lived practice, producing ‘contradictions of space’ for people settling in new landscapes.

Laura Robson

Internationalist descriptions of displaced communities often comment on their statistical youthfulness as an indicator of a basic problem – sometimes worrying about young people’s high levels of need, but more often unreflectively associating youth, in itself, with the potential for social disruption and various kinds of radicalism. This talk explores how young people in refugee situations have unwittingly become a venue for the expression of broad political anxieties mostly derived from domestic realities across the Global North, and seeks to contrast such rhetoric with the demonstrable reality that refugee youth placed in receptive host societies actually often emerge as resettlement’s major success stories.