In
2001, RAPAR’s founders were approached for help by community health,
cohesion and social work practitioners who were confronted with a new
population when refugees, forcibly dispersed to these practitioners' localities in
North West England conurbations for the first time, became their
‘clients’.
Drawing
on our skills and networks as clinicians, epidemiologists and social
scientists, our personal identities as refugees and second or third
generation migrants to the UK, and our professional relationships with
community development practitioners, RAPAR gradually became live.
RAPAR began to reach the national media with our research about what was happening to people seeking asylum from bothIraq (2003)and Somalia (2004)and to their local communities here. However, during 2004-5, RAPAR faced highly concentrated - and highly placed - efforts to stop its work in its tracks; see 2011 University of Oxford PhD thesis by Joshua Hatton entitled How and why did migration and refugee studies (MARS) facilitate migration control? (click here for pdf) particularly section 4.3. on power and practice (pp.254-278).
The organisation originally comprised researchers, policy formulators and front line practitioners within key statutory services, and small pockets of displaced people. At its inception, it aspired to the continuous development and delivery of action-orientated research, community development and individual casework about and with - as opposed to on and for - displaced people and their surrounding communities. This aspiration continues.