Our blogging exercise is slightly different this week as we will be welcoming Mike Molloy, former Canadian Ambassador to Jordan and Director of Refugee Affairs at the time of the Indochinese refugee crisis, to our class. Your assignment, as a result, is to read excerpts from the collection Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese …
Continue reading “The American War in Vietnam and Indochinese Refugees”
This week we are starting to complicate the history of refugee protection and relief by thinking about the ways in which the limitations of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention Related to the Status of Refugees were amplified or complemented by distinct initiatives targeting particular refugee groups. As the United States never acceded to the 1951 …
Heads up: the readings for October 16 are going to require a bit of creative thinking and a lot of intellectual energy. The challenge will be to take everything you have learned about the history of refugees and forced migration to date and think about what it means to think historically about these topics. What …
Continue reading “History, the 1951 Convention and the art of book reviews”
And the archivists come through..a belated note to say that the archivists from the Jewish Distribution Committee were able to identify the mysterious Katz referenced in the Glikowski letter that we considered as part of our work on Daniela Gleizer’s chapter. Looks like he was based in Paris at the time the letter was written. …
What an engrossing week – we are starting to take our baseline knowledge of the evolution of refugee movements and support for refugees and complicating it by thinking about the way that refugees have been caught up in international politics (Spanish Civil War), the way that their movements have been mediatized and represented (Soviet propaganda) …
Continue reading “Civil Society and Refugee Representations”
Well, our great temporal leap has begun. This week we began focusing on so-called “modern refugees” by exploring human displacement in the context of the First World War. Every time I return to this topic I am awed by how much displacement the war portended and how we can trace the origins of a great …
This week we are doing a sweeping overview of histories of forced migration and displacement from Biblical stories of exile to the 17th century persecution of French Protestant Huguenots. The idea behind this vast undertaking? To get at a sense of how entwined stories of forced migration are with the history of humankind and also …
First day of classes yesterday and a lovely chance to get to know the members of the seminar a bit, figure out interests and experiences, and future goals and spend some time thinking about the nature and possibilities of a course on the history of refugees and forced migration. As always, technical difficulties made things …
This blog is where students will maintain a reading journal for the course with ideas, thoughts and opinions set down before each meeting. Ultimately, these musings will become a more formal journal that will allow for reflections on what was learned over the course of each semester.
It’s mid-August and classes are just a few weeks away now. I am excited to begin populating this blog with course materials. With all the focus on environmental refugees, deaths and arrests in the Mediterranean and the borders politics in the United States, I don’t think I have ever taught a course that seemed so …
History of Refugees and Forced Migration