Refuge in Words | Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies

This UC Book Talk is part of UCHRI’s 2022-23 initiative, Refuge and Its Refusals, which considers refuge and its discontents in the self-understanding of the humanities alongside the contributions of refugee scholars and refugee scholarship to the history and futures of the humanities.

Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, with Yen Le Espiritu (UC San Diego), Lan Duong (University of Southern California), Ma Vang (UC Merced), Victor Bascara (UC Los Angeles), Khatharya Um (UC Berkeley), Lila Sharif (Arizona State University), and Nigel Hatton (UC Merced)

Recording

This conversation features members of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective talking about their new co-authored book, Departures (UC Press, 2022), which advances the field of critical refugee studies.

The book outlines the field’s main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees’ rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to connect communities, movements, networks, artists, and academic institutions and forge new and humane reciprocal paradigms, dialogues, visuals, and technologies that replace and reverse the dehumanization of refugees. This resource and guide is for all readers invested in addressing the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production, and global imaginings of refugees.

The Critical Refugee Studies Collective is 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. Collective members not only study refugees, but many are also refugees themselves with long and deep ties to refugee communities in California and beyond.