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(California) Dreaming at the 2021 Cambodia Town Film Festival
January 3, 2022
“My friend once asked me if I wanted to smoke. I guess he thought it would help.” As some of the first words that pass between the two main and only characters of the 2019 short film California Dreaming, this line moves us toward writer and director Sreylin Meas’s caring and diaphanous storytelling. In the course of this passing confession to a stranger on a tree-shaded path, we are given the sketch of a dislocated relationship. For viewers, the desire to soothe a difficulty or harm that remains unnamed emerges. The specifics – who, why, help with what – are kept out of frame. Still, something important is offered. This Khmer-language short film from Phnom Penh-based Cambodian filmmaker Sreylin Meas was screened this past September at the 9th annual Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach, California. California Dreaming gives a closely framed view of a chance meeting…
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Literary Spotlight: “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives”
September 23, 2021
The Displaced is a collection of seventeen short stories by writers who are refugees. Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, each story narrates the writers' experiences of displacement from many countries—Việt Nam, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Ukraine, Mexico, Ethiopia, Bosnia, fleeing varied circumstances— genocide, poverty, war, state repression, and civil war, of their journeys through different routes, transit points and destinations; journeys that, as one of the authors, Maaza Mengiste, puts it, “break a human being and rearrange them inside” (135). Together these stories challenge singular narratives about displacement and “of perpetual crisis and suffering” in the Global South (Tshuma, 160).
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Between Being and Acting: The Refugee Child in The Jungle
September 1, 2021
The child’s black hair is tangled, and there are faint streaks on her face and arms – dried sweat, perhaps, or soot. Her pink sneakers are worn to the sole. We lock eyes for just a moment before she leaps up and struts – hips swaying – to the opposite end of the stage, as if on a catwalk. Jarred, I flip through my program to find: “Arya Rose Lohmor is 8 years old and loves to perform. In 2014, she walked the ramp in the India Fashion Kids Show in Delhi, India.” Arya plays Little Amal in The Jungle, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s The Jungle premiered in London in December 2017, followed by St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and San Francisco’s Curran Theater…
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Asylum, Repatriation and Border Management during a Pandemic: The Case of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon
June 18, 2021
As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its second year, thousands of people around the world continue to be infected at a steadily increasing rate. The pandemic has severely affected the living situation and conditions all over the world, and has been remarkably salient towards refugees and asylum seekers who constitute a particularly vulnerable group. Lebanon, being the second main country of refuge for Syrian refugees and the country hosting the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, is not an exception to these disruptions. Syrian refugees in Lebanon comprise a particularly vulnerable population and as such, are being affected disproportionately on multiple levels…
Read moreRefugees, Palestine, Settler Colonialism, Gaza, state violence, ethnic cleansing, justice, Palestinian Feminist Collective
A Statement on Palestine
May 18, 2021
What follows is a love letter written by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. The Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC) is a US-based body of Palestinian and Arab women and feminists committed to Palestinian social and political liberation through a praxis guided by anti-colonial work and life-affirming decolonization for Palestinians in the homeland and the diaspora. By sharing this Love Letter, we invite our readers to help envision a world built on love and freedom—one in which freedom is guided by unconditional acts of loving without shame and without apology. We are guided by a deep love and respect for the people and lands of Palestine and we weep alongside them while working and envisioning a better present and future for Palestinians.
Community, History, Refugees, Tamil Refugees
Refugee Communities as Agents of Historical Change: Tamil Refugee Responses during the Coronavirus Pandemic
May 14, 2021
On April 27, 2020, the Tamil Refugee Council made a statement on Facebook about the extreme difficulties facing Tamil refugees in Australia who had lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic and were unable to feed their children: “On Saturday we had to deliver formula milk for a one-year-old child in Geelong.” Over the following months, the Tamil Refugee Council documented the plight of Tamil refugees on its Facebook page while making visible the vital role played by its Tamil volunteers…
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Transient Performance
March 17, 2021
A photograph of Scherezade Garcia’s In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, from the series Theories of Freedom, (2011) adorns the cover of our special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. The material artwork is a sculpture that uses more than thirty swim rings (also called inner tubes or lifesavers) of different sizes and in various hues of blue: either solid or with prints. Suspended in the air or against a wall, these objects are bound to one another with plastic ties; many of them have airport luggage tags that read “JFK.”
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Migrant Justice Beyond Borders: Notes on the Collaborative Project “Migrant Connections”
February 25, 2021
Migrant Connections is an oral history project that connects migrant organizers in Greece and students in the “Borders and Migration” course at the University of Utah to share stories of daily life and activism. You can learn more here: https://migrants.lib.utah.edu
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Feminist solidarity with Gaza must challenge Western representations of #Arabmen
February 11, 2021
Thursday November 14, 2019: Sitting on my balcony looking out over the city of Amman, I sip my coffee and begin what has become an integral part of this morning ritual in every corner of the globe. I scroll through my various social media accounts, glancing over the most recent developments in Trump’s impeachment inquiry and the usual posts by friends. This morning, though, there are new posts, denouncing the latest round of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, which began just two days ago on Tuesday, November 12, 2019…
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Refuge
June 24, 2020
“Refuge” is a photographic art project that looks at the global refugee crisis through a sociological prism by focusing on the integration of refugees in Germany after the massive influx in 2015. To counter the images widely seen in the media portraying masses of migrants devoid of individuality, I turn my camera to what happens behind closed doors and photograph Germans and refugees who live together under one roof.
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Inspiring Digital Reciprocity Amid Catastrophe: Lessons from the Palestinian Refugee Pandemic Response
April 30, 2020
In the middle of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Mina H, a young doctor living in Nahr al Bared refugee camp in Northern Lebanon sent out a digital plea for money and food on Facebook and WhatsApp to her extended family and village network living around the globe. In particular, she harnessed her pre-refugee crisis village network that, socially speaking, is still alive and functioning in digital spaces, to put out the call for help…
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Cooking Across Generations
April 6, 2020
On November 2, 2019, the United Women of East Africa in San Diego hosted Cooking Across Generations, a community-building gathering of local refugee families from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia to share their traditional foods and cultural performances. Funded by the Critical Refugees Studies Collective, the event was a collaboration by the UC San Diego Center for Community Health, the Karen Organization of San Diego, and the United Women of East Africa…
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