Dr Rebecca Buxton’s ERC Starting Grant on Learning from Experience and Agency in Displacement (LEAD) is a €1.5 million interdisciplinary research project developing new theoretical and methodological tools for building refugee-led approaches to displacement justice. The project draws on debates in ethics, social and political philosophy, and refugee and forced migration studies.
Starting in February 2026, the project will run for five years from 2026 to 2031 and is hosted by the Philosophy Department at the University of Bristol.
The project starts from the observation that refugees are often spoken about but rarely spoken with. The vast majority of politicians, policy makers, academics and philosophers working on questions of migration justice—especially around forced migration, asylum, and refugeehood—usually lack experience of displacement and frequently fail to include those who do. This is despite the fact that refugees, of course, discuss displacement justice with their own communities in response to their personal experience and expertise.
In recent years, literature in refugee studies and the ethics of displacement has begun to reflect on how displaced people respond to their experiences of forced migration, emphasising the importance of their choice, autonomy, and lived experience. This ‘agential turn’ is partly reflected in parallel moves on the part of NGOs and international agencies.
But within the world of philosophy, refugees and other forcibly displaced people are almost never included within the project of theory-building itself. This project seeks to change that, by asking: what would a refugee-led approach to theorising about displacement justice look like?
Dr Buxton has recruited a team of two postdoctoral researchers and two PhD students to join her on the project, blending a mixture of philosophical expertise across social epistemology and normative methodology in social and political philosophy with empirical expertise in qualitative and quantitative methods, enabling direct engagement with refugees, asylum seekers, and other forcibly displaced persons. The project will collaborate with refugee-led organisations, researchers, and international agencies to motivate more meaningful practices of inclusion in the project of theory building.