2025 International Conference: Refugee & Migrants in our Common Home: Mobilizing Academic Communities for Action.

Date | October 1-3, 2025 (Jubilee for Migrants is October 4-5)

Place | Augustinianum, Rome/Italy

Call for Participation | Deadline January 27, 2025

At Pope Francis’s address at the international Refugee and Migrant Education Network’s conference on migrant and refugee education, he called on the academic community to contribute to an understanding and promotion of migrants and refugees. Villanova University’s Strategic Initiative for Migrants + Refugees in partnership with the Augustinian Secretariate for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation, the Center for Migration Studies (CMS), the Refugee & Migrant Education Network (RME Network), Jesuit Refugee Services, the Scalabrini International Migration Institute (SIMI), the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) among other partners, are embarking on a three-year project engaging key Catholic institutions from around the world to co-create a college and university-focused joint Action Plan that mobilizes academics and their community partners in a worldwide response to critical issues impacting migrants and refugees.

This is not a typical academic conference. It’s a multi-year project modeling a new way forward. Through Keynote addresses, panel discussions, Lightening Talks, poster presentations, and break-out Working Groups, a curated group of action-driven stakeholders will collaborate on drafting an Action Plan that articulates a mission and vision, recommends action items, shares best practices, includes a broad range of possible interventions that respond to the different local contexts of the members, and states clear milestones and deliverables.

We invite you to participate in this audacious project. Apply by Monday, January 27, 2025. (Applications submitted after the deadline may still be considered on a rolling basis, depending on availability and the strength of the application).

For Call for Participation see here.

Learn more about the project: