Diya Abdo

Diya Abdo is the Lincoln Financial Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College. A second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Dr. Abdo’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms as well as refugee and immigrant issues. She has also published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience was published by Steerforth Press in 2022 and selected by the North Carolina Humanities as a North Carolina Reads Book for its 2024 Book Club Program. In 2015, Dr. Abdo founded Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which advocates for housing refugee families on college and university campus grounds and supporting them in their resettlement. The flagship chapter at Guilford College, now one of several ECAR campuses, has hosted 90 refugees thus far, including 16 Afghan evacuees. Dr. Abdo designed the minor Forced Migration and Resettlement Studies at Guilford College where students learn about refugee issues and receive credit for hosting refugees on Guilford’s campus and supporting them in their resettlement. Dr. Abdo is the recipient of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s Innovation Prize (2021), Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award (2019), Gulf South Summit’s Outstanding Service-Learning Collaboration in Higher Education Award (2017), and The Washington Center’s Civic Engagement in Higher Education Award (2017). In 2018, she was named a finalist in the Arab Hope Makers Award. She has been making presentations about ECAR far and wide, including the White House and the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Dr. Abdo sits on the Advisory Board of the Community Sponsorship Hub. She lives in Greensboro, N.C., with her partner and two daughters. To learn more, visit the ECAR website or watch Dr. Abdo’s TEDxtalk.

Gül İnanç

Gül İnanç is the co-founder of Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS) at
University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is a diplomatic historian of modern West Asia and has published 3 books and several articles on modern Turkish diplomacy. She founded the global initiative Opening Universities for Refugees (OUR) in 2015. Her recent publications include Access to Higher Education: Refugee Stories from Malaysia (co-authored), Routledge, 2018, and Forced Displacement and NGOs in Asia Pacific (co-ed), Routledge, 2022. She has received the Koh Boon Kwee Scholars Award in August 2016 for inspirational teaching at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she was affiliated between 2012-2022. Dr. İnanç has recently co-led the global task force with UNHCR to change the language of Social Impact Rankings of Times Higher Education. She is based in Savannah, GA and offers an online course “Culture & Identity” under Bard College, OSUN for her students who are in Kakuma/Dadaab camps, Kenya. She is currently affiliated to Guilford College as a visiting scholar. To learn more about OUR’s work watch Dr. İnanç’s TEDxtalk.

Naglaa Rashwan

Naglaa Rashwan is the Training Coordinator for the NC Enhanced Mobile Crisis Unit
Pilot at the UNC Greensboro Center for Youth, Family, Community Partnerships. An
immigrant from Egypt, she received her MA in Community Health from UNCG and is
currently pursuing her PhD in community health with a research focus on culturally
responsive evaluation practices. Naglaa has worked and visited more than 30 countries around the globe. Her interest is focused on capacity building of volunteers, staff, and community organizations on mental health and psychosocial support. Naglaa has developed and conducted many trainings in the US and worldwide. She is invested in tailoring training curricula to the strengths and needs of training participants, and her approach to training is participant-focused. She empowers training participants to share their uniqueness and expertise in the training setting.