Nineteenth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

In the last two years, we have witnessed an unprecedented migration of people from their homelands to other parts of the world. Indeed, global displacement of people is the highest ever recorded - at nearly 250 million, or approximately 3.5 percent of the world’s population. The international press and human rights organizations have rightly focused attention on the geo-political and social causes of migration, the anguish and suffering of the migrants themselves, and the frequently violent ideological obstructions to their resettlement in secondary or tertiary countries. This interactive dramatic and spoken word performance enacts the following questions: How do we make sense of global border crossing academically, respectfully, and emotionally? How do we understand and honor the voices of the migrant experience in transnational social spaces, particularly if most of us have not had a parallel experience? This session proposes a multimodal, arts-based, exploration of these questions. Using drama, role-play, sound, visual images and spoken word poetry, we both problematize and perform the complex conceptual and methodological issues in migration, language and education across geographical, linguistic, cultural, and emotional spaces. The audience will collectively participate in a dialogical experience that augments more conventional research “treatments” about communities and nations undergoing internal and external displacement. Global migration and its concomitant human suffering is not merely academic. It is real. Thus, a process that pushes us to think both theoretically and emotionally moves us from stoic to transgressive interpretations of the migration phenomenon.