On 15 April, our School of Social Sciences welcomes one of the most senior UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) officials in the Mediterranean, an area that has been the epicentre of refugee flows into Europe for over a decade. Jason Hepps, the UNHCR’s Deputy Representative in Greece, will present the 2021 Arthur Lewis Lecture, the School’s flagship social responsibility lecture, entitled “Refugees & the Mediterranean: can one be both pragmatic and principled?”

Jason has been working for UNHCR since 2004 in various positions throughout the world, including country and field offices in Djibouti, Liberia and Montenegro. In Headquarters, he served as Senior Executive Assistant to the Assistant High Commissioner for Operations and most recently as Senior Regional Protection Coordinator for the Syria situation in UNHCR’s Middle East and North Africa Bureau based in Jordan. He participated in extended emergency field missions with UNHCR, including in Syria and Peru.

We are delighted to welcome Jason to present this prestigious lecture to honour Sir William Arthur Lewis, economist, Nobel Prize winner and Britain’s first Black professor. After the lecture, there will be an extended Q&A session, where attendees will be able to address questions to the speaker.

You can book on to the Lecture here.