ABOUT

The journey of this archive originates from my practice-led doctoral research titled “In the Shadows Of UNHCR's Data-Fiction - An Inconsistency Framework And Platform For Humanitarian Counter Narratives: I'M HERE'” in Creative and Critical Practice in Digital Media at the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex between 2019 and 2023.

In my research, reflecting on over a decade-long service at United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as an international professional working with data, I explore the gap between the rights outlined in international refugee law and the actual experiences of refugees in UNHCR's digital media representations.

CREDITS

System Architect/WriterCeren Yuksel

Full Stack Developer/RealizerMuhammed Waqar Arshad, Adamas Solutions. Contact Info: waqararshad@asitss.com

SUGGESTED CITATION

Ceren Yuksel, In the Shadows of UNHCR’s Data-Fiction: An Inconsistency Framework and Platform for Humanitarian Counter Narratives, Doctoral Research in Creative and Critical Practice, University of Sussex, 2023.

COPYRIGHT

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

'I‘M HERE: Archive of Counter-Narratives' is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This license allows you certain freedoms while providing certain conditions for use.

The people shaping Refugee Data Minder

This archive is a collaborative project between research-led design, humanitarian insight, and practical software delivery. Learn more about collaborators whose experience makes the work possible.

System Architect / Founder

Dr Ceren Yüksel

Ceren Yüksel is the creator of RefugeeDataMinder and a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the MA Internet Equalities course at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London.

Before moving fully into academia in 2021, she pursued a 15-year career as a humanitarian professional, primarily with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. She worked in data and information management roles across multiple forced displacement settings, from mass influx crises in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and South Sudan to regional and global levels.

She led key initiatives, including UNHCR's global refugee data analytics and reporting tool, Population Registration and Identity Management Eco-System (PRIMES) Dataport; community-based paralegal and legal aid mapping systems to end statelessness; and UNHCR's Global Community of Practice for Data. She learned the machinery of humanitarian data from the inside, then turned that knowledge outward to ask questions about what that machinery cannot, will not, or is not designed to remember through RefugeeDataMinder.

Her current scholarship brings computation together with practice-led approaches to social change.

Full-stack Lead

Waqar Arshad

Waqar Arshad is a full-stack web developer and systems thinker with over a decade of experience building cloud-based platforms, dialers, and e-health applications.

Trained in Electrical and Telecommunication Engineering at COMSATS University, he has delivered human-centred projects across both LAMP and MERN stacks, often bridging legacy systems with modern frameworks to meet real-world needs.

Waqar brings a rare combination of technical range, calm judgement, and follow-through. He can move between database architecture, backend logic, interface details, and server-side fixes without losing sight of what the archive is trying to do.

He is the person who makes ambitious ideas technically possible and keeps them working. Based in Pakistan, he is also a father to four wonderful children. While managing a company full-time, setting up youth projects, cooking, doing the school runs and the laundry together with his wife, he somehow also volunteers his time to RefugeeDataMinder at night and whenever the universe briefly pauses.

It remains unclear how he does all of this without a second Waqar, but he insists it's just time management.