Pioneering Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond dies

Tributes have been paid to Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond OBE, Emerita Professor and founding Director of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at Oxford University, who died on Wednesday 11 July 2018. Professor Harrell-Bond OBE was best known as a legal anthropologist and active humanitarian, who founded the RSC, part of Oxford's Department of International Development, in 1982 and directed it until 1996. An unflinching advocate of legal aid programmes for refugees, and research and teaching in refugee studies in the Global South, Barbara was a driving force behind the establishment of a number of programmes in countries that included Uganda, Egypt, South Africa, and the UK. Refugee rights were more than just an academic area of study for Barbara, keeping the issue at the centre of the humanitarianism agenda and at the forefront of public consciousness, was a life-long commitment that she advocated for until the day she died. Refugee rights continue to have increasing social resonance today, an age when asylum and protections for refugees are the subject of continuous, fierce debate. Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond OBE, Emerita Professor and founding Director of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at Oxford University, died on Wednesday 11 July 2018. Image credit: OU Prior to her time at Oxford, she conducted research in West Africa from 1967-1982, while employed by the Departments of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh & University of Illinois-Urbana, the Afrika Studiecentrum in Leiden, and the Faculty of Law, University of Warwick.