From War to Resettlement: Refugee Stories, Insights, and Practice Guidelines

What does it mean to be a refugee?

What are the experiences of living through war, fleeing violence, and resettling in a faraway country where you must learn to live an unfamiliar way of life?

In this interactive half-day presentation, Dr. Zuhra Teja will take you on a refugee’s journey—from pre-flight to flight to resettlement.

Drawing on global human rights standards, she will ground participants in ethical and research-informed service-delivery through a trauma-informed and rights-based lens.  Through stories from her clinical work with torture survivors, her work in conflict and post-conflict societies, her family’s lived experience of migration across four continents, and her research with adolescent refugees, we will hear the voices of refugees and war-affected families. 

Along the way, she will offer questions for self-reflection and collaborative consultation: What are our accurate and inaccurate assumptions about refugees from diverse cultural contexts?  How do we preserve the therapeutic relationship while working with interpreters?  And how do we foster emotional safety, dignity, resilience, and hope?

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:

Dr. Zuhra Teja, R.Psych

Dr. Zuhra Teja is a Registered Psychologist in British Columbia with extensive work experience both internationally and in North America.

She has worked as a consultant in conflict and post-conflict regions, and provided psychotherapy to refugee victims of torture. She has worked with organizations and institutions including the International Rescue Committee, University of Central Asia, and Oxfam UK. She has also been recognized by the Clinton Global Initiative for her work toward expanding the field of school psychology in Central Asia. Dr. Teja holds a PhD in School Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Special Education from the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral work, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for Canada, explored how refugee youth reason about moral issues. She is the author of the chapter School-Based Interventions for Refugee Children, published in the Handbook of Applied School Psychology by Cambridge University Press. She is the former Vice-Principal of the BC Provincial Outreach Program for Autism and Related Disorders. She is also founder and owner of Self-EDvocate, an Education and Diagnosis Center where she provides psycho-educational assessments here in Vancouver. In 2024, she was awarded Alumni of the Year by UBC’s Faculty of Education.