Category Archives: Season 1
Aleksandar Hemon
Yến Lê Espiritu
“Critical Refugee Studies”
with Yến Lê Espiritu
Critical Refugee Studies Collective
Featuring Yến Lê Espiritu, a distinguished professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her books Body Counts: The Vietnam war and Militarized Refuge(es) and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (co-editor) have charted an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies, which reconceptualizes “the refugee” not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques.
In this episode, Saida Hodžić and Sabrina You (former Cornell student) talk to Dr. Espiritu about her role in organizing the critical refugee studies collective and her research that critiques militarized humanitarianism while illuminating the experiences, memories, and postmemories of refugees and their children who craft their lives in the ever-unfolding afterlife of war.
“My career has really been trying to challenge the notion of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. That profoundly wrong myth erases the violent peopling of the U.S. By saying that the immigrants come to the U.S. voluntarily, it erases the history of settler colonialism, of chattel slavery, of annexation, of conquest. It also erases the history of immigration exclusion, it acts as if the U.S. welcomes all immigrants. In fact, for most of its history and still today, the U.S. has consistently excluded potential immigrants from coming to the U.S. through immigration law. And thirdly, the nation of immigrants narrative erases the history of the U.S. military interventions around the world, and that’s where my book Body Counts is calling attention to the connection between militarism and migration.”
Mimi Thi Nguyen
“Refugee Patriots, Refugee Punks”
with Mimi Thi Nguyen
https://www.mimithinguyen.com/
Featuring a conversation with Miimi Thi Nguyen, an associate professor and chair of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A zine maker, columnist, blogger, punk. Author of The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages which illuminates how imperial politics produces refuge patriots. Focusing on Vietnamese refugees to North America who end up participating in the war on terror.
In this episode, we talk to Dr. Nguyen about her research on how refugees reckon with the forces that demand their participation in military imperialism and her trajectory as a refugee/activist/punk/scholar.
“I understand myself as a refugee and a punk. For me, they’re deeply fused together.”“Punk was my first radical education in thinking about empire. In thinking historically and critically about the war that made me a refugee too, to understand deeply that state violence and imperial war and indigenous dispossession were all entwined and were a part of history that was unfolding in front of me.”
“I felt like I was being told that there are certain things I was supposed to want, that certain things held out a promise of a good life. And I didn’t want them.”
Zrinka Bralo
“Building Power: Hope Is a Verb”
with Zrinka Bralo
Featuring Zinka Bralo, the Chief Executive Officer for Migrants Organise, London. A refugee, a journalist who worked with leading war correspondents during the siege of Sarajevo in the 90s, founder of ‘Women on the Move Awards’, and winner of the 2011 Voices of Courage Award by the Women’s Refugee Commission in New York. As the commissioner of the Independent Asylum Commission, Zrinka successfully negotiated the end of immigration detention of children in the UK in 2010.
In this episode, we talk about Zrinka’s innovative model of combining organizing and campaigning for systemic change with community-based, grassroots access to justice in form of support for people affected by the U.K.’s hostile environment immigration policy.
“There is a lot of talk of lived experience. I absolutely hate that expression.”
“Tell me why”
“So, first of all, everybody has got lived experience, whoever is alive has lived experience…but there is also something about reducing people just to that experience, which sort of takes away their agency. They’re framed in a way where they just testify about the oppression that they’re experiencing. And that’s a very reductionist approach. And then they’re sort of trotted around, they share their story, they retraumatize themselves, it’s very exploitative. Even if you prepare people for that, it’s still very exploitative. We tend to say: I don’t want you just to speak from your experience, I want you to speak from the movement. So when you’re wrapping up, what is your one message that you want people to do? What is the legitimacy for the action you’re calling for? And that needs to come from us together, from the community, from the movement.