Transits: Keywords for Critical Refugee Studies
Khatharya Um
Ethnic Studies
UC Berkeley
Participants
Victor Bascara
Asian American Studies
UC Los Angeles
Fori Berhane
Anthropology
University of Southern California
Lan Duong
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
Nigel Hatton
Literatures, Languages and Cultures
UC Merced
Yên Lê Espiritu
Ethnic Studies
UC San Diego
Lila Sharif
Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University
Ma Vang
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
UC Merced
As “history’s battered subjects,” refugees have been the subject of volumes of study in sociology, political science, and literature, coming into being in this scholarship as in-between figures that symbolize victimization, resistance, or postmodern interstitiality. Despite the volumes of words that are used to talk about refugees, there is, in fact, a paucity and poverty of language that speaks to the lived experiences, affects, and subjectivities of refugees. Refugees know full well the power of words that can determine whether one lives or dies, what claims one can make, whether one is visible or invisible and how. One of the key challenges in refugee studies is the discursive (mis)representation of refugees and refugee lifeworlds. The critical intervention that we, the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), seek to make with our proposed co-authored book project, Transits: Keywords in Critical Refugee Studies, is to reclaim the power of representation through re-storying.
