This is an online version of our MA Refugee Care, designed specifically for interactive, online delivery. This course is taught through distance learning meaning the entire year, or two years, of the course is taught online with no face-to-face, in-person teaching. Where possible, flexibility will be exercised to accommodate different time zones, for example with 1-2-1 sessions being held at a time best suited to you. You will graduate with the same qualification as our campus based MA.

Interested in the course but want to study on campus?

Founded in 2004, this unique course brings together people from diverse walks of life and parts of the globe to explore how we can therapeutically care for refugee people more effectively. Whereas other institutions and courses focus on the study of refugee people, our course focuses on the caring of them, on how we can intervene therapeutically to support this segment of our society.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, there was demand to offer this course online and we approved an online option of the MA Refugee Care course, which is identical in content (number of teaching modules, their structure and themes), and equal in value and experience. This option enables students anywhere in the world to take this course without reducing its quality, whilst they continue to live in their own localities and retaining with their existing employment.

Through lively seminar discussion we unpack the experiences of involuntarily dislocated people as multi-dimensional and complex, and explore psychosocial perspectives and different types of intervention and activism. We discuss how we become more therapeutic in our work with them as a distinct skill, different from offering psychotherapy. Through our course, you gain practical expertise in challenging negative and limiting stereotypes of asylum seekers and refugee people as being merely traumatised individuals, passive recipients of help. You also gain new insight into effective humanitarian work with these individuals, families and communities. The course provides you with the tools to discern the suffering, pain and distress of these people, whilst also appreciating their retained strengths (Resilience) as well as their new strengths that they acquired from being exposed to adversity (Adversity-Activated Development). This programme is closely associated with the Centre for Trauma Asylum and Refugees.