ICAR

Dr. Maknun Ashami

Maknun has considerable experience and knowledge of the UK voluntary sector, including work with refugees, migrants and on issues of poverty, through his work is an independent consultant in London over the last 15 years. He also teaches Migration and Refugees at Birkbeck College. He has undertaken research for local government, charitable trusts and community groups and covered groups from Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Alison Harvey

Alison is the General Secretary of the Immigration Law Practitioners' Association. She is a non-practising barrister who has specialised in work in immigration, asylum and nationality since the mid-1990s, representing individuals and working on policy and legislation, in the UK and overseas. She is a former Chair of the Refugee Children’s Consortium, a former trustee of Bail for Immigration Detainees and Asylum Aid and is a trustee and former Chair of the trustees of ECPAT UK. A former editor of Butterworths Immigration Law, she writes and lectures widely on immigration, asylum and nationality law.

Prof. Roger Jowell

Roger is a research professor at City University London where he directs the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys. He is the Coordinator and Principal Investigator of the European Social Survey - a 33-nation comparative survey of changing social values in Europe. Prior to that, he was the founding director of the National Centre for Social Research, which grew into Britain's largest institute for social research. He writes and lectures widely on social research issues - both substantive and methodological.

Dr. Khalid Koser

Khalid is Deputy Director of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement. Previously he was Senior Policy Analyst at the Global Commission on International Migration. He is currently Chair of the UK Advisory Panel on Country Information.

Shamil Sharshek Ulu

Shamil is currently a Project Manager for West London YMCA where he manages supported housing for young homeless people in Ealing. A former broadcaster and director of a youth NGO in Kyrgyzstan, he arrived in the UK as a refugee in 2003.

Kate Smart

Kate is Policy Advisor to the 5 leading refugee agencies that form the Inter-Agency Partnership on Asylum support. She has previously worked for the Refugee Council, Oxfam, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, the Kosovo Evacuation Programme and spent a year as a visiting research fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre. Kate worked with ICAR to produce a number of research reports on media representations of asylum.