How can marginalised people find a new identity through entrepreneurship? How do women help their families survive in foreign lands by undertaking new endeavours? And all of this when ‘most of all, they just want to go home’.

Dr Sophie Alkhaled, Director of the Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations in Lancaster University Management School, joins us to talk about the lives of refugees in camps and communities outside their homelands, and how women there have discovered business to help their families live.

She tells us how her personal life experience and heritage shaped her interest in both refugees and gender equity, from seeing her mother prohibited from driving in Saudi Arabia, to living under the Assad regime in Syria, and travelling to refugee camps that are home to her countrymen and women.

We find out how millions of Syrians were forced to flee their homeland, how entrepreneurship takes hold in unexpected places, and how women came to reimagine what an entrepreneur and business leader is as they try to make sure they have food on the table.

Sophie tells us how entrepreneurship is a means of survival and empowerment for these women; how their Syrian products can keep national identity and pride alive among the refugees; how in many cases the money from these businesses was the only thing ensuring that refugees could eat and pay rent; and we talk about how refugees can leave a country with war or famine and move to another with difficulties of its own.

We also look at the Academy and its work on gender equality in business schools and beyond. This takes the discussion into business realms and countries all around the world, and Sophie talks about the importance of being a hopeaholic when it comes to seeing changes around gender equality.

Plus, why did Jan leave New Zealand? How bad are the All Whites football team if someone who played for Barrow once represented them? And is Paul dead inside?

Find out more about Sophie and her work here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/people/sophie-alkhaled

Read about her research on Syrian women refugees here: https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_FiftyFourDegrees_Issue_17/26/

And this is where you can discover the Academy for Gender Equality and Social Justice Research in Organisations: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lums/research/research-initiatives/gender-equality/

Episode Transcript