Transits: Key Words for Critical Refugee Studies

Abstract

We, at the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, are a group of interdisciplinary scholars who advocate for and envision a world where refugee rights are human rights. Committed to community-engaged scholarship, the Collective charts and builds the field of critical refugee studies by centering refugee lives– and the creative and critical potentiality that such lives offer. In addition to studying refugees, many Collective members are themselves refugees with long and deep ties to refugee communities. In this session, we each present on a “key word” in positing a different orientation in the Humanities as it relates to the figure of the refugee. “Transits” will be a dynamique colloquium that puts into place a new vocabulary to structure refugee discourse.

Presenters

Lan Duong
Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, United States

Fiori Berhane
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Southern California, California, United States

Yen Espiritu
Distinguished Professor, Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego, California, United States

Ma Vang
Associate Professor, History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced, California, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Colloquium

Theme

2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities

KEYWORDS

Refugees, Transits, Key Words, Epistemologies, Cosmologies, Futurities, Gender, Sexuality