Team articles

THE SPACES OF CITIZENSHIP: MAPPING PERSONAL AND COLONIAL HISTORIES

Global Mobility Project graduate student associate Eleanor Paynter’s article “THE SPACES OF CITIZENSHIP: MAPPING PERSONAL AND COLONIAL HISTORIES IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY IN IGIABA SCEGO’S LA MIA CASA È DOVE SONO (MY HOME IS WHERE I AM)” was recently published in the EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF LIFE WRITING.

ABSTRACT: As Italy has changed from emigration country to immigration destination, the growing body of literature by migrant and second generation writers plays an important role in connecting discourses on race and national identity with the country’s increasing diversity and its colonial past. This essay investigates the 2010 memoir La Mia Casa È Dove Sono (My Home is Where I Am) by Igiaba Scego, the daughter of Somali immigrants, as life writing that responds to these changing demographics and, more broadly, to the migration trends affecting contemporary Europe. The self Scego constructs through her narration integrates her Roman identity and Somali background as the narrative returns colonial history to Italian public discourse and public space. I argue that by narrating the personal and historical in the context of Roman monuments and neighborhoods, Scego’s memoir challenges and redefines who can be “Italian,” modeling a more inclusive Italianità. I discuss the memoir in terms of its use of collective memory and its development of a narrative “I” that claims a position within a collective identity while challenging the exclusionary tendencies of that very group.

Read the full article here: http://ejlw.eu/article/view/193

Questions of Refugee Deservedness

This article, written by one of our Grad Student Affiliates, was originally published in Anthropology News.  

by Kelly A. Yotebieng
Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology

The Anthropologist as an Ally

As anthropologists of forced migration, we are used to being kept on our toes as the nature, causes, consequences, and policies that enshroud forced migration are constantly fluctuating. When I returned to Cameroon for ethnographic fieldwork after over a decade living in the region as a humanitarian professional, I came with the intention of working with a large and growing population of Central African refugees. When I had last left Cameroon a year earlier in 2015, this population was growing rapidly, and garnering the attention of the world, or at least those of us who pay attention to forced migration in Africa. However, in the midst of my research over the summer of 2016, I found a Rwandan community silently struggling with the invocation of a Cessation Clause, built into the 1951 Geneva Convention, for all Rwandan refugees who arrived in asylum countries prior to 1998 and who had not been resettled. They feared this clause would cause the majority to lose their refugee status at the end of 2017. As many had hedged their bets on resettlement, they were at a loss of what to do next, after decades of waiting, and what now felt like rejection of the very foundation of their fears of returning home. Intrigued, I shifted my focus.

Continue reading…

Syrian refugees ‘detrimental’ to Americans? The numbers tell a different story

A new article from Global Mobility Project team member, Jeffrey Cohen.

President Donald Trump wants to close the door on Syrian refugees, barring them indefinitely from settling in the U.S.

In an executive order signed on Jan. 27, the president wrote:

“I hereby proclaim that the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States and thus suspend any such entry until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest.”

USRAP stands for United States Refugee Admissions Program.

In light of the president’s executive order and the continued debate over the status of refugees in the U.S., I’d like to reexamine two questions: What are the chances that a Syrian refugee might live in your community? And what is the risk that he or she would be a terrorist?

Continue reading here

With 10,000 Syrian refugees resettled in the US, are more on the way?

Last month, the Obama administration announced that it plans to accept 110,000 refugees in 2017, a 57 percent increase.  In this article from The Conversation, Jeffrey H. Cohen discusses the logistics of such a huge plan concluding that “the U.S. has a unique opportunity to safely settle more Syrian refugees as part of a united response to the country’s ongoing civil war.”

https://theconversation.com/with-10-000-syrian-refugees-resettled-in-the-us-are-more-on-the-way-65203

Refugees or Immigrants? The Migration Crisis in Europe in Historical Perspective

In January, historian Theodora Dragostinova wrote an article for Origins which explored the causes and pathways of today’s refugee crisis and reminded us that displacement and migration have long defined European history.

Read the article here: https://origins.osu.edu/article/refugees-or-immigrants-migration-crisis-europe-historical-perspective