Refuge, Asylum, Detention: A Feminist and Queer Lens

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84 million people and counting worldwide have been forcibly displaced by war and violence. The majority are stranded with insecure legal status in refugee camps and urban-peripheries in the Global South. Those who seek refuge in the US, Europe, or Australia face ongoing violence and rights violations, including incarceration in camps and detention centers. Others are granted temporary protection that turns refuge into decades-long protracted insecurity. In this discussion, we use feminist and queer lenses to analyze these movements and containments. We explore how gender and sexuality shape refuge, asylum, and detention; how a feminist and queer standpoint illuminates the structures that produce and sustain global apartheid; and how refugees and their allies resist these forces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Cornell Migrations Initiative

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• The main trends in contemporary asylum politics, including global border closures, refugee waiting, detention, and protracted insecurity
• How the U.S. asylum detention system operates
• The ways in which gender and sexuality shape migration, asylum, and detention
• How feminist and queer perspectives help us better understand refugee and asylum politics to challenge structures of incarceration, xenophobia, nationalism, and global apartheid
• What feminist, gender, and sexuality studies can learn from contemporary refugee movements, politics, and epistemologies
• The avenues for joining feminist and queer studies with abolitionist movements against incarceration and border closures

SPEAKERS

Elif Sari ‘21

MARTHA LA MCCAIN POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW

Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto

Prameela Kottapalli

STUDENT IN THE FEMINIST, GENDER, & SEXUALITY STUDIES AND COLLEGE SCHOLAR ('23) PROGRAMS

Cornell University

Saida Hodžić

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND FEMINIST, GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES

Cornell University

Co-sponsored by the Cornell Migrations Initiative