Speaker Bios
Share the Platform is an initiative which brings together practitioners and scholars from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds, with the mission of “centering the expertise of refugees to improve policy, programs, and practice.”
Dr. Alfred Babo is an Associate Professor in the Sociology & Anthropology Department at Fairfield University. He also serves as the Director of International Studies Program at Fairfield. Dr. Babo is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise and experience in the anthropology of development, political science, and African studies. He has presented his work nationally and internationally and published it in many peer-reviewed journals in the US, Africa, Europe, and Asia. His recent and current research projects and publications in English and French, focus on the issue of refugees’ activism in Africa and acculturation in the US. One of his recent articles “38 Paradise Road: Being an African Francophone Refugee Scholar in American Academia,” was published in the Journal of International Mobility and was featured at the 2023 conference, “Refuge at Risk: Concepts, Infrastructures, Futures,” at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Babo is co-editing a collective book entitled Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?, which features refugee scholars hosted in Europe, Canada, and the USA. He is currently a member of the Board of Scholars-at-Risk to help exiled academics. On February 8, 2023, Dr. Babo received the Fairfield University Martin Luther King Vision Award to recognize his engagement with refugees and vulnerable individuals.
Anita Fábos is a professor in the department of Sustainability and Social Justice at Clark University. Dr. Fábos is an anthropologist who studies how people who experience displacement and forced migration think about and organize their mobile lives. She has lived, worked, and conducted research together with diasporic Sudanese Muslims and other forced migrants in the Middle East, Europe, and North America. As the convenor of the Integration and Belonging Hub at Clark University, Fábos incorporates insights from how people on the move craft belonging into her analysis of refugee and migrant integration policies and shows how settled communities can practice integration and belonging together with newcomers. Fábos is devoted to teaching, research, and praxis that incorporates collaboration with people from refugee and forced migrant backgrounds. Students in her classes have carried out community-engaged projects that have investigated refugee participation in community development initiatives, refugee access to higher education, refugee livelihoods in Worcester, and experiences of belonging and home for people from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds. Fábos coordinates the SSJ Graduate Certificate in Refugees, Forced Migration, and Belonging, as well as Clark’s Scholars-at-Risk chapter.