From War to Resettlement: Refugee Stories, Insights, and Practice Guidelines

What does it mean to be a refugee?

What are the experiences of living through war, fleeing violence, and resettling in a faraway country where you must learn to live an unfamiliar way of life?

In this interactive half-day presentation, Dr. Zuhra Teja will take you on a refugee’s journey—from pre-flight to flight to resettlement.

Drawing on global human rights standards, she will ground participants in ethical and research-informed service-delivery through a trauma-informed and rights-based lens.  Through stories from her clinical work with torture survivors, her work in conflict and post-conflict societies, her family’s lived experience of migration across four continents, and her research with adolescent refugees, we will hear the voices of refugees and war-affected families. 

Along the way, she will offer questions for self-reflection and collaborative consultation: What are our accurate and inaccurate assumptions about refugees from diverse cultural contexts?  How do we preserve the therapeutic relationship while working with interpreters?  And how do we foster emotional safety, dignity, resilience, and hope?