Speakers on “Panel 5: Refugees and Diasporas” will be presenting their work from 3:25-4:45pm in Allard 122.
Marianne El-Mikati (UBC) | “Borders, Identity and Belonging: Navigating Middle Eastern Diasporic Experiences in Solidarity with Indigenous Communities in Turtle Island”
This paper will explore how Middle Eastern refugees and forced migrants (RFM) are transformed after arriving at the intersection of refugeehood and settler-complicity when migrating to Canada, a state founded upon stolen Indigenous territories. As RFM occupy space in host countries, the act of crossing national borders strips them of a particular belonging and forces them to don a new identity which they may not particularly understand or identify with. The act of navigating shifting understandings of belonging as a result of traversing borders is especially complicated when RFM are called upon by the Canadian state to preserve and uphold settler-colonialism. Thus, investigating how a migrant’s right to refuge intersects with the Indigenous right to land back –when mediated by the presence of a settler-colonial state– is crucial to unpacking the spatial and temporal liminality which RFM are entrapped within.
After unpacking the ways in which RFM and Indigenous communities are placed in opposition within Canadian understandings of national and cultural belonging, it is crucial to illuminate examples of reciprocal solidarity, meaningful accountability and community care which can sustain collective liberation. In doing so, such models of mutual survivance between RFM and Indigenous communities charts a path towards holistic justice which holds space for both diasporic experiences and dreams, and Indigenous goals of self-determination and land back.
Ava Tabatabaei (UBC) | “From Everywhere and Nowhere: Understanding Iranian-American Identity as a Balancing Act”
This project works to rehumanize political theory by placing it in conversation with diverse case studies of individuals and groups from the Iranian-American diaspora. Focusing on political theories of identity and identification, specifically strategic identity theory, I consider how the experiences of those who grapple with their Iranian-American identity can help us challenge strategic identity theory’s emphasis on rationality—i.e. the assumption that people make rational decisions when engaging in political relationships.
I first outline the different mechanisms and constrictions that delimit Iranian-Americans’ ability to navigate their identity, including the repertoire of operative identities that may reasonably apply to them in a given social situation, the institutional constraints on identity (e.g. legal definitions of ‘Middle Eastern’), and the strategies they may employ to identify with/against a particular label for some perceived benefit. I then argue that to truly understand identification, strategic identity theory must examine the consequences of navigation, including the emotions that inform and result from rational choice. Whereas an individual may be able to turn ‘on’ a favorable identity, they still must reconcile the turmoil that arises from “covering or de-emphasizing their other identities. For instance, although it may be strategic to anglicize one’s name in a particular social circumstance, feelings of disassociation frequently arise after denying a part of their full repertoire of identities. Overall, this project works to recenter emotion and the individual in political theory, especially when pertaining to identity, while simultaneously offering the diverse people of the Iranian-American diaspora ways to reconceptualize their own complex identity.
Samuel Arnone-Roller (UW) | “Nation in Absence of Homeland: Displaced Indigeneity in Yarmouk Camp”
Whereas Syria’s Palestinian policies preserved refugee uprootedness as an instrument of foreign policy, this paper argues that the emergence of the Right of Return Movement was a flashpoint for the mobilization of Yarmouk’s Palestinians against the Syrian regime. In doing so it outlines the demand for Palestinian self-determination in a context where a national community exists in the absence of its homeland. This condition, termed ‘displaced indigeneity’, is also elaborated as a potential theoretical contribution to describe the ordering of a nation’s social relationships in exile and the means by which the nation is sustained. In making this case I hope to highlight the Syrian state’s marginalization of Palestinians in their own struggles and the reality of Palestinian agency which it has sought to shroud. Moreover, I hope to highlight the sometimes-overlooked contributions and sacrifices of Palestinians toward the Syrian Revolution and the challenges of reconstruction in service of their community.
Ahmed Erdogan (UW) | “Resistance Resurrected: Political Spaces of Refugees in Turkey and in the EU”
It has been traditional to read refugees as persons of emergency and exception, with biases that presuppose invisibility, victimization, and weakness. The latest Syrian refugee displacement due to the Syrian civil war has been another expression of these biases. Yet, this exact displacement of the refugees, and their respective spaces, had also been the protest against those biases in which resistance over the right to life and governance took place. There is, therefore, this need to retrain what has hitherto been a discussion of weakness in the “spaces of refugees; the need to move away from conceiving refugees merely as persons of weakness subjected to control and violence. In this view, this paper desires to explore what strategies the EU and Turkish governments employ to govern Syrian refugees and the counter-interventions that creatively undermine those employments by refugees, which bottoms for resistance.
This paper thus provides insights into the relationship between power and resistance, demonstrating how specific technologies of governance create opportunities for subversion and sabotage, and ultimately argues that Syrian refugees in Turkey are able to carve out their own political spaces through political creativity, where resistance and self-governance take place. These political spaces, too, effectively change the perception and spaces of refugees – from people whose lives are to be saved to people who self-govern and resist for their existence.