Skip to content
Clark University
Integration and Belonging

Stephanie Acker

Stephanie Acker, visiting scholar at the Integration and Belonging Hub

Stephanie Acker is a policy, program, and communications leader in improving outcomes for forcibly-displaced populations—from having designed and managed multiple programs for refugees from the ground up to leading national emergency responses to asylum-seekers. Further, she has conducted research and policy analysis on a national and international level. Her research focuses on analyzing understudied and underdeveloped areas of refugee governance to identify innovative policy solutions to improve refugee protection.

Acker is conducting exploratory research to understand the role that beauty and beautification plays in how refugees make home in exile and how this could inform policy frameworks and service-delivery in protracted refugee situations. If beauty is therapeutic and could be a force for good as literature suggests, why would our policies that seek to alleviate the suffering of the more than 84 million forcibly-displaced individuals ignore it?

To address this gap, Stephanie Acker co-founded the  Home Ground Lab with Dr. Devora Neumark. The Home Ground Lab was a creative research and storytelling initiative housed within Clark University’s Integration and Belonging Hub. The Lab focused on the intersection of aesthetics, justice, and the built environment, exploring how beauty functions as a vital form of infrastructure in spaces often overlooked by traditional design and policy systems: refugee shelter, transitional housing, and communities shaped by displacement or marginalization

Relevant Works