Anthropology of Refugees

Catalog description

This course offers a critical introduction to the heterogeneous global histories and contemporary world politics that shape the experience of refugees globally and in the United States. By reading a rang of anthropological as well as other related theoretical texts, we will explore issues central to the field of refugee/forced migration studies. What experiences define a refugee? Who is included in the category "refugee," and who or what decides? What constitutes a refugee camp, and where do refugees go from a camp? How have refugees resettled in American cities fared in recent times? In approaching these questions, the course will focus on the topics of displacement, dispossession, statelessness, border crossings, emplacement, refugee rights, subjectivity, and aspirations. We wll examine ethnographies of Palestinian refugees in refugee camps in Lebanon to foreground lived experiences of encampment; Cambodian refugees resettled in the Bronx, New York to understand the relationship between the United States and the refugees it willingly accepts; and the everyday experience of Somali refugees living in Lewiston, Maine to underscore how recently arrived refugees navigate everyday marginalization. We will also consider our local context of Syracuse, New York as a major site for refugee resettlement since the 1980s.