On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction
1. Introduction
Humanities are academic disciplines in which humans seek understanding of human self-understandings and self-expressions, and of the ways in which people thereby construct and experience the world they live in. Thus, the tentative definition [is]… Most humans are “other humans”, near and far. To understand these, we need to be able to communicate—and, hence, we need language. And we need to understand their context, their place, the space they move in. As we seek to understand them, we need to reflect upon the process of understanding and the criteria involved. Our scholarly understanding of others need not be received well, as historical insight may be at odds with the self-understanding of people involved.
… In the humanities we study human languages, historical episodes, cultures, artistic expressions, ritual practices, religious beliefs, and much more. We study histories and languages of people far and near, and thereby we come to understand better our own language and history as well. By studying their art and their beliefs, we may come to reconsider our own beliefs and expressions as well. By developing our knowledge of humans, by engaging in the humanities, we learn to navigate this complex world with other humans. We are humans studying humans.
2. Between Conceptual and Material Ways of Being
Dialogue I: On Dialogical Research
Gerawork T. Gizaw: What are the steps and how are we going to interact? [00:10:00]3
Evan Jewell: I think we envisaged it as having a large portion of this transcript in the Introduction … if you were okay with that …our hope was that, whatever emerged from this, it would be continuing the dialogic structure of the volume. [00:06:00]
Elena Isayev: I think we just need to see what might work better, but keeping it very much dialogical so that it becomes a semi-creative piece of work. [00:09:00]
Marcia C. Schenck: The whole process of research in the first place is a dialogue, right? So that’s just making it very explicit by saying, here’s the transcription of the dialogue. [00:08:00]
Elena Isayev: … so Marcia…
Marcia C. Schenck: I am going to speak more about the scholarly production side of this, because that’s the environment from which I can comment. And here I actually really like that you talk about a manifesto because to me that’s really important to frame it in that way of having a written statement in which you talk about your intentions of what more inclusive scholarship can look like. I was reminded very much of, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s reflections on silences (Trouillot 2015, p. 25). When we talk about refugee history, we often say it’s so hard in the archives to really get at the historical agency of those who were displaced. But then there’s many ways around that, and I think you have found a great way, by engaging voices from very different contexts, and also by bringing practitioners into the conversation.
The four ways in which historical actors that are at the margins, like refugees or displaced people, get silenced according to Trouillot, are in the making of the source itself, in the assembling then of the archives and in the conception of historical narratives, as well as in the creation of what he calls “history in the final instance”. This whole special collection goes to address these different stages. You’re creating an archive, right? You have, for instance, the beautiful poem Time, which can be read as a primary source in itself. The Catalysts all contribute to creating an archive. And they are sources by themselves or [00:38:00] in and of themselves. And then you are creating historical narratives where you have the papers authored by historians that reflect on different archives, bringing in the Catalysts as well as primary sources. And then you are writing also a version of history in the final instance with of course the histories and the responses. Pluralizing that, because you have respondents getting back at the papers that are being produced, commenting on them from very different angles. And that again opens up the field of what the final production of history might look like. We can see the different forms of these dialogues when we take, just as an example, Lena, your piece and then the responses to it by Paul Magee and Paul Collis—the recorded conversational response about meanings of non-arrival and arrival in the Aboriginal context.4 We can also see how diverse history can be, and this is to me a really strong point of the Special Issue, that it addresses all these forms of silencing those at the margins. [00:39:00] And again, by saying “those at the margins”, I’m of course talking from a very specific state-focused lens that defines who’s at the margins of what.
Elena Isayev: Thank you…and also for bringing in the way other frameworks might help showcase [how] things could be taken forward beyond this kind of volume… and we might get [to] that towards the end.
Evan Jewell: That really made me rethink, especially the Catalyst section, [00:40:00] just thinking of it as an archive. It’s something that hadn’t hit home as much as it should have, so thanks for that.
3. Key Themes and Interventions
Dialogue II: Displacement as Mobility
Evan Jewell: The first question we wanted to start off with was: did you find if there’s anything that surprised or excited you about the volume or its contributions? Just anything that caught you off guard or stood out to you, good or bad, that made you think differently. [00:12:00]
Gerawork T. Gizaw: Actually, there are many things that really strike me. The first one, which I raise as a good point, is the question that you brought in the beginning related to mobility. I think it’s good if I read it now, it says, “what does it mean for a human mobility to become a problem or a crisis?” For me, that’s a very big question and I expected some answers in the details there. Unfortunately, the volume goes in a different direction. I don’t know whether it is deliberate or I misunderstood the concept. [00:13:00] [The volume] tries to separate displacement away from mobility. It defines displacement as an involuntary movement, and it indirectly defines mobility as a voluntary movement. For me, there is a very big—I don’t know what to call it—gap, which differentiates my experience from the experience of that mentioned there [in the volume]. When I think of displacement or, as you said, involuntary movement, I see my experience and others’ experience within our context, and most of our mobility could be called displacement because most of it is involuntary. [00:14:00] I understand that as mobility, as a natural way of coping and living. It might be caused by routine conflicts, natural disasters or —whatever we’ve faced in that system.
So, to me, the real definition of mobility includes displacement …, but the volume entirely removes displacement from mobility. So I started thinking, okay, if involuntary movement is displacement, I ask myself, what is the other voluntary movement? I think those voluntary movements like tourism, education, which are considered formal ways of movement now came to exist after nation-states emerged. So it was very difficult for me to go back and find some past [00:15:00] stories related to displacement which are different from mobility. In this sense, I see the gap. Such a gap disfavours people who are like me. Just to give you some specific examples. Here in the host nation, the Turkana community, right now, whenever there is a drought, they cross the Uganda border with their cattle. For me, that’s part of mobility. Cattle raiding is common here, in Sudan and Ethiopia, which causes mobility. We consider it as part of our lifestyle. We don’t even consider it as conflict, or conflict is part of the lifestyle, that’s how I see mobility from our context.
Elena Isayev: Thank you, Gera. Before we answer or respond to that powerful insight, maybe Marcia wants to pick up some of those points.
Marcia C. Schenck: I like the way that you think about displacement as involuntary movement because [00:17:00] coming from a labour history angle, mobility offered a way to not think of migration as very defined, or teleological, but really as happening more on a continuum in which you have more or less mobility and freedom, but really most of it is somewhere in the middle. We don’t really have pure forms of forced or voluntary migration, because many people usually move for a variety of reasons at the same time. But at the same time, in recent years, the literature has embraced mobility in very uncritical ways. Almost positing mobility and freedom as equal, and thereby buying into this neoliberal narrative, which will talk about flexibility or self-innovation and [00:18:00] not think about the constraints that come with a global labour market in which one moves for instance, or what other economic imperatives or experiences of violence there might be that compel people to move. So in that sense, I think this kind of uncritical move towards mobility or a celebration of mobility isn’t very helpful. While displacement might not be a perfect word, it sort of brings this being “in place” or being “out of place” of a person … to the foreground. That to me is very helpful in thinking about bodies and people that move across time and place, and then one can broaden the conversation: what aspects are perhaps voluntary, what aspects are involuntary? What does that even mean? How do systems, how do contexts influence these decisions?
Evan Jewell: Gera, your response really made me think because it’s a really valid critique, I guess in the sense if I understood you correctly, using the term [00:21:00] displacement, are we re-inscribing mobility as a problem, right, as a crisis, because that very term, has all of these implications within it. And, people who are displaced when they are called displaced are often then thought of as a problem. In that sense I think that’s something we—I definitely take your point—we didn’t really tackle that as much in terms of digging down into the word itself and have we really gotten away from that?
Elena Isayev: In terms of what Gera was saying, I wonder, it’s interesting Gera that on the one hand you’re positioning, quite rightly (and I think this is what Evan was referring to) as let’s not think about these things as dichotomies, but rather see them as part of one process. And then as Marcia is saying, how we define voluntary and involuntary could itself be both problematic and may mean different things in different historical contexts as well as in [00:23:00] socio-political contexts. But I’m also wondering to what extent there is an assumption that most people don’t move. So in other words, that mobility occurs only when something comes under stress, except for the very few examples that you gave about positive reasons for mobility, like education or other voluntary reasons for mobility as tourism. And I think that’s something that, at least within the ancient context, we can really begin to challenge. So when we think about causality, in historical terms, if we’re starting out from the perspective of sedentism as the norm and movement only happens if something disrupts that, then you have very different issues around causalities of why certain things happen. And the movements of people are seen as negative—climatic changes, even in the ancient world that drive people to move somewhere else en masse or sieges that force people out. But the other thing we see outside of mass displacements [00:24:00] is a very high level of individual or personal mobility where people set out without necessarily knowing when they will come back, if they will come back, or even their destination. Different things drive them in different parts of their life. I think there is something we didn’t touch on in the Introduction—but pick up in other bits of writing—is the life-cycle. And this also maybe addresses some of what Marcia was saying, which is: if we are to talk about freedom in relation to mobility, it’s about having the freedom to move maybe in earlier years of one’s life and then having the freedom to not move in later periods of one’s life. I don’t know if freedom is the right word there, but I think in that sense of seeing things as part of a continuum, is definitely something we need to reflect on more [00:25:00].
4. Citizenship and Cosmopolitanism
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries sheWith silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
Dialogue III: Agency and Metaphor
[We asked Gera and Marcia to pick out a few examples of interest to them. Here Gera begins by discussing wandering and permanent temporariness in Elena Isayev’s piece].
Gerawork T. Gizaw: The more wandering becomes political, the more it becomes problematic in such contexts, at least. So it’s true, and it’s in my experience, but we are not wandering for such a purpose. The other one [that interests me] is—how to pronounce it—Diogenes the Cynic who’s advocating for cosmopolitan ideals. This is really interesting and I like it, and I wish it would happen, because when I see how the way that some idea of displacement assumes a nation-state, and the way things are intertwined within and across nation sates, I don’t think the solutions can be found there. [00:52:00] To me, as a displaced person, I feel as if mobility works like a safety valve. Without this safety valve, the state may not sustain itself and work.
Elena Isayev: I liked very much your way of expressing the safety valve, which I hadn’t thought about—mobility as a safety valve. Because that brings a question around what is a safety valve. I think I would question, then, your point at the end which said that, for nation states to survive, they need a safety valve. A lot of people that I’ve talked to in the past think that the nation states are the problem, so we don’t necessarily want them to survive. But is it a safety valve then to something else? … Benjamin Gray’s piece in the volume, [00:56:00] when he talks about citizenship… he goes into that kind of world in much more detail.
[…]
Gerawork T. Gizaw: Another takeaway from Diogenes’ reflection, is the statement that refers to everybody’s subversion of the wandering state as a way of being political. Actually, this is my daily experience. Yes. Whenever we are wandering, we see, we connect things and the moment we express it, it looks like political. Thank you for mentioning it in that way, but it’s not a deliberate attempt and we don’t want it to look like that. [00:51:00] The people who are wandering are not the ones who want it to look political, rather it’s a surrounding that makes it political.
Marcia C. Schenck: For me it was like it’s in your heading Lena [of your chapter], the “defiance of the wandering philosopher”. So to me what jumped out was, Diogenes’ attitude towards where he finds himself—having not very much, being in a land far away from what he would see as his home—but trying to see that as a strength. I like the reading of agency in that situation because you read it as a rejection of the victim label. And as we know from at least a lot of [00:58:00] scholarship about refugees in the 20th century, the label of victim was a very important one to inspire donations and fundraising for UNHCR and other initiatives around refugees. So in that sense, refugees and the victimization narrative have been very intertwined, at least in the second half of the 20th century. And I think it’s very interesting to have an early example of how that narrative actually gets cut. And instead, mobility, and in this case also poverty, is sort of claimed as a choice, and when he [Diogenes] was evicted he says, but I condemn the others to stay there. And I think that is a really, really great line because we always talk about leaving as a choice, but really staying is a [00:59:00] choice too. Everybody makes a choice every day, whether that’s to pick up and move or whether that’s to stay. It’s just that the first we always frame as exceptional and the other as the norm. It’s a very convincing reading of the agency of those who find themselves perhaps involuntarily moving that lets them be the agents of history, the agents of their own life choices.
[…]
Gerawork T. Gizaw: Okay, I forgot about the issue of innovativeness. One of the takeaways considers as if we [displaced people] are innovative. Some writers [like Oka, Jansen and others] who studied Kakuma camp and wrote about our entrepreneurial nature (See Oka 2011; Jansen 2018)—in their discussion, they show how we refugees do everything possible to survive, [01:04:00] including illicit or semi-illicit activities, because the question is about sustaining life or survival and such actions seem justifiable. Yes, that form of innovativeness or that form of entrepreneurial skill is there, but when we go out [of the camp] it may not reward us. So if that type of creativity is considered as innovativeness, I think it may be misleading. There are so many matrices that limit us from what we want to do. We do everything possible to pass through them and get what we want. But should we consider that as if we are innovative? I’m afraid not. I remember when we revised a book with Kate [Reed], one refugee who reached Europe in the Jungle camp, had navigated so many countries, including the UK. He finally came back to the Jungle camp. To cross every nation’s boundaries he encountered, he used creative ideas and did everything possible. Yes, of course, there is [01:05:00] creativity there, but at the end of the day, this is what he said: Now I am a different person. I’m not the one who used to be there at home. That different persona that allowed him to do very illicit things brought a different type of personality. So I’m afraid that we may also encourage this type of thing when we say refugees are innovative.
Elena Isayev: What you just said is incredibly powerful, but also in conversation with all of us, what it makes me realize is how much work (at least I’ll speak for myself), how much work I still have to do to recognize where on the one hand I’m trying to bring things together on a particular plane, but actually in the end inadvertently (that’s not an excuse) still create an exclusionary narrative, [01:06:00] or a narrative that is sometimes naive or hopeful, but not hopeful in a way that helps because maybe it masks a lot of things. So …thinking about innovation. I’m very critical of the term resilience for all the reasons that you’ve just described, but I hadn’t assigned those criticisms to also thinking about concepts like innovation.
Evan Jewell: I just want to echo what you were saying, Lena. The bit about agency and the problematics, it’s a thorny word. We try to infuse it with this positive connotation and so forth. And a lot of our authors use that. [01:09:00] But at the same time, as you say, Gera, it kind of—along with endurance and persistence—these words can be euphemisms, but they also can mask a lot of the actual experience of displaced people. And what you were saying in terms of the transformative—not necessarily in a good way—experience, right? How people are just completely changed irrevocably, even as they are supposedly “innovating”.
5. Hospitality
6. Materiality and Spatiality
Dialogue IV: Meaningful Life and Place
Gerawork T. Gizaw: Actually, all of my explanation here is based on experience and my wild imagination. This is what I thought when I think of displacement and the waiting. It brings the issue of home, host, place of belonging, migration, especially the word non-arrival and non-return. It’s because, these [concepts] assume a constant place exists. But the term “mobility” transcends that, transcends boundaries. But the issue of displacement and placement is within the scope of boundary, the issue of host, even home, is within the scope of boundary. From my [00:26:00] practical experience, the issue of home, place of belonging, are not tied with specific place. They come from the experience and the way we attach our feelings to it. So that’s why I say mobility may be a more favourable word to my experience than the term displacement.
Elena Isayev: I’ll have to think about what we’ve inadvertently done in trying to open something up. It sounds like maybe we could have actually shut things down because of the assumptions we’re making of the starting point that you just described.
Evan Jewell: And what is place, like the role of place I think seems quite important there. We’ve, maybe [00:27:00] overemphasized that from a particular mindset.
Marcia C. Schenck: I think it comes back to what we’re writing against, right? Because we’re writing against this bias of stasis or sedentarism. And because that is what we’re trying to open up, we come back to it through the back door. And with non-arrival or non-return, I don’t think we have to necessarily refer to the place of origin. I think there’s a way to speak about that in cycles rather than to go back to one particular place in a linear account. So, like being cognizant of the fact that historical figures or mythical figures move through different places and perhaps redefine what being at home means, as Gera was just saying, that there is an attachment of feelings towards a particular place, rather than the place in itself, necessarily. And so then we can still keep the ‘non-arrival’ and the ‘non-return’ as metaphors to talk about this, but making it more explicit that we’re not referring to the origin or the place of birth, but that the origin narrative itself could be something that shifts over time.
Elena Isayev: I think Gera in one of our conversations much earlier on, you touched on this, but I don’t think we had time to explore it. So if you want to start us off on this now, about meaningful life in the meantime. And I think you challenged the notion of “in the meantime”. I don’t know if you wanted to say a bit more on that, which seems to tie to exactly what we’re talking about here, but we can move on to a different issue.
Gerawork T. Gizaw: No problem. But would you please clarify [what you mean] when you say “meaningful life”?
Elena Isayev: Yeah, so it’s about challenging the idea that people are living in liminal spaces and in limbo, which is part of what the conversation we’ve just been having is about, but trying to recognize that life lived wherever one is living, even if it’s to do with non-arrival—between non-arrival and non-return, is [00:30:00] also a life that is meaningful. But, it could be attached to the wandering state in the way you’re saying as well.
Gerawork T. Gizaw: Okay. I might put it like this, when I think of a meaningful life in that context, which as you said, is in limbo, what opportunities are there that makes my activity, my actual thinking meaningful, that is the question that I ask. So the life which is meaningful to me may not be meaningful for others based on their experience, whatever it is. So there are things that each one brings that are meaningful to them/her/him. I read a book written by a Holocaust survivor,5 who [00:31:00] created a very good meaning and came up with psychotherapeutic techniques. I understand that, we can bring out any meaning from every situation, but the problem here is that the meaningful life that one wants and creating meaning because of certain situations are two different things. For example, for me, based on the situations that are imposed on me, I have something that I call a meaningful life. Let’s say, for example, based on my background, based on my career experience, there is something that I can offer to my colleagues who are living here. That gives me meaning, but it doesn’t mean that I should live like the others because that may not give me meaning and even may create more suffering. People create different meaning based on their own experience. In some cases, some people’s experiences are unthinkable, [00:32:00] to me, I ask them how do they do such a thing? That is because I don’t have those experiences, and I don’t see those opportunities. So to answer it straightforward, yes, as you said it everywhere, a meaningful life can be created. But what it is, depends on individual circumstance, knowledge, experience, and the belief and value system that one has embraced.
7. Geographies of Displacement and De-placement
8. Reception and Practice—Decolonising the Classics
Dialogue V: Turning the Lens
Elena Isayev: So what work do you feel remains to be done that this volume does not or cannot do? And what might be included in the next iteration of this manifesto?
Gerawork T Gizaw: Okay. Let me start. I may say something related to the question that says: this volume may make an impact on academia, but does it serve any purpose for displaced people or community to your mind? Yes, absolutely. As I already mentioned, it’s helping me to reflect on my own experience. Some of the past stories that are mentioned are good lenses for me to see what’s going on here. Even knowing what was happening in the past by itself is consoling, so it really serves us, but it can also be improved. Or in the [01:14:00] next round of dialogue, it can be expanded. For example, where I would like to expand on it is in relation to the regime. Because most of the conversation is now directed towards those who are victims or displaced, it should also be directed to people who are the actors; they are many, and there are stories there. So if all sides of stories come out and we see the whole interaction there, it may become more meaningful and we may understand the reality in a more complete form.
[…]
Gerawork T. Gizaw: I got so many [00:48:00] important things from the volume that made me reflect deeply, not to mention that it considered permanent temporariness as a regime, which I didn’t see in such a way. And it is the reality, which I fail to understand it in that way. Yes, it’s a system that’s why it has been sustained for so long. That was quite interesting for me, but it brought another question. Who are the actors in the regime? How can we express them? How can we see the dynamics, the chemistry, are areas to work on. I have to explore more there. Actually, the sides of the people who are displaced, who are in limbo, most of the characteristics are mentioned there, but the regime cannot be built with a displaced person only. So there [00:49:00] are missing pieces there to consider it as a regime, that may be the remaining task.
9. History: Reflections on Agency, Power and Belonging
Dialogue VI: Across the longue durée
Marcia C. Schenck: What I want start with is actually Susanne Lachenicht’s contribution, and that’s because I’m currently based in Germany and I’m German and she starts, basing her paper in the German context inspired by 2015, which was a year that saw a lot of arrivals in Germany. I really like that she starts framing her introduction by saying, yes, 890,000 people arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany seeking refuge and asylum in 2015. In the same year though, there were also 864,000 US citizens that moved to Germany and almost [00:42:00] 600,000 people, left the country within the same year. So, just this framing is not the usual framing. Usually you just get one number, which is arrival of asylum seekers. And I think just the framing of the picture brings us back perhaps to the point that Gera made in the very beginning, the picture of mobility, and this isn’t even the complete picture, but just starting to sketch out the picture of mobility in Germany in 2015, a little bit actually helps us to put into context numbers. And I think this also brings us to a larger point of the volume. Because there’s a tendency, especially in migration studies, but also in the media reporting on people who move, to focus on the numbers and not on the individual human stories [00:43:00]. The very journal in which you’re publishing is called Humanities, right? So the very approach you’re taking to this is human-centred, and I think this is also extremely important, for us to be able to connect better.
And so, to come back to Susanne Lachenicht’s contribution, she asked, and I quote (p. 1): Can we compare present migrations with other, past migrations? And what can we learn from this? She is not the only contributor who asked this question, but she does it [00:46:00] very explicitly. I think what we can learn from this is that history can be the reminder of how things like borders, citizenship, and movement work very differently in very different government structures, economic structures, geographical structures. Tracing changing structures over time can be a reminder that the present moment and the nation-state system in which we’re living is not how it has to be. So it opens up possibilities to think differently or imagine a different future. And I think that to me would be what, across these different contributions that I’ve read, is the big takeaway. So we don’t necessarily learn from history. [00:47:00] We don’t take a one-on-one lesson, but we do take this understanding that whatever categories we use today and however they might work in a systemic level today is just one way of them being not necessarily the way they have to be. And so really open up a different way to collectively think about a different future.
10. Methodology—Dialogic, Multi-Temporal Form
Dialogue VII: Refusing Boundaries
Marcia C. Schenck: And I think this brings me to answering [00:19:00] the question that Evan posed in the beginning, what did I really like about this Special Issue? To me what’s really, innovative about it is this ability to read and explore across so many boundaries. So it’s an Issue that brings together people across disciplinary boundaries, across temporal boundaries, across boundaries of being practitioners or academics, across geographical boundaries. And it really enables, in my mind, very unique conversations. Because this is not something that you see often … something that bridges that many boundaries. We’re quite good at creating boundaries around disciplines, around time periods and staying within our siloed conversations. And I think this is really a very brave attempt to tear down those walls and actually have a conversation all together. And so the way that you [00:20:00] started off with these very concrete Catalysts by people who are practically and currently engaging in creating a city space or, doing architectural work in refugee camps or working with refugees in different cities. So very practical embodied experiences to start off a broader conversation, that feeds into more scholarly discourses actually, I think worked really well.
[…]
Gerawork T. Gizaw: As Marcia said earlier, one of the good things of this paper is it brings diverse conversations and different cases together, even challenges are there. And through all those interactions, one can [00:34:00] see the collaborations that have been going on. Regarding the approach, I have one issue. It says, this is not the same as letting contemporary [00:35:00] concerns drive what we research in history, but rather recognizing that our questions of the past are framed in the present through its categories and lenses. As I said earlier, my experience forces me to expect solutions, I wish that we could create a question for our current concern and look back for solutions in the past. For me, that may be more helpful, it could even be a way that we express our responsibilities.
Elena Isayev: Yes. In other conversations, which we’ve been having together from ROUTES,6 about boat crossings, we are hopefully trying to do that or at least to edge some way towards that, which is about, how you pose such questions and allow research to [00:36:00] more directly address contemporary concerns.
11. Conclusions
Dialogue VIII: Manifestos for Future Work
Marcia C. Schenck: And now where do we go from here? Three things came to my mind. The first, because I’m a teacher, I think this Special Issue would be really, really fantastic to use in the classroom, specifically those contributions that bring the present and antiquity together. Because this is a combination that I rarely see in the literature, and I think it would be really fruitful in helping students to question the [00:44:00] categories that they come across now, like passports or borders, when they see how differently these things worked over time. And the second thing would be to bring the Special Issue back to the communities in which the contributions originated. This could be the Dandara community in Brazil, or it could be the camps in the West Bank, or it could be the different universities at which people work. Maybe some of these conversations could be recorded, maybe some of them could be collected. And then we have sort of this meta level of the meta level, right? So like how do different people in different locations now read this material and engage with it, I think would be super interesting to follow up with and have that as an addendum or something to this Special Issue. And the third thing is that I was wondering, because some of our work aims to unsettle the narratives that we [00:45:00] see replicated in the media, and I was wondering how do we reach with that kind of work also people who write for the media? So would that be a press toolkit? Would that be a special event for journalists? To me that [reaching journalists] would be really, really fruitful, just because the different contributions unsettle so many of these narratives that I think a lot of people have internalized when they think about migration, including also journalists.
I love the framework and I think it would be great if a future volume or follow up work could actually address all historical periods. And then also in terms of geographical dispersion, Asia I think is a blind spot right now. Then I also would love to see [01:17:00] a section added that thinks about, alternative imaginations of the future throughout history. So, we have Tangible Creations, Volatile Concepts and Critical Approaches. And the imaginings [historical ideas about different futures]—because we’re interested in the study of history to allow us to think about the world in which we live anew. I’d be really interested in how did historical actors throughout all these different time periods think the world anew? What kind of imaginations did they sustain about mobility in an imagined future at that point in time of writing? I think that would … help us do the work which we want to do with our deliberations of history in the present.
Evan Jewell: There’s so many things that have come out of here. I didn’t intervene before, but I mean, Marcia I hadn’t thought about, the potential for this to reach journalists who, even in my own paper, that’s something that I came across a lot was the discourse of these metaphors of waste. And these were also used in ancient contexts and how they just continue to be picked up. But how do we communicate this kind of thing to the media? I think that’s a big challenge for us as academics and for displaced individuals and communities. And, I don’t know how we can team up in a sense but holding a media training workshop of some kind. Information session would be interesting. It’s given me ideas, [01:20:00] and your perspective is such an important one in terms of really cutting through I think a lot of the academic discourse we can get caught up in … in a certain framework, right? I think it will allow us to move forward even in the volume that we’re currently editing.
Elena Isayev: I just wanted to follow up what Evan was saying. It’s not just that it cuts across academic discourse, but the conversation is a very different kind of academic discourse, which is inclusive in a positive sense, but also inclusive by highlighting that—one hears it a lot, the words privilege—that we are all in an equal plane, but are we? [Yet] saying we are part of the same continuum. So then it’s a question of where within that continuum there is that difference. Like the displacement and mobility issue that you [Gera] highlighted at the beginning [that one is part of the other rather than distinct from each other]. How do we do this… recognizing that this is not about a them and an us, but where we stand on that continuum.
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | According to the UN, by the end of 2016, about two-thirds of all refugees were in protracted refugee situations, and for half of this group, that period has extended for at least 20 years. UNHCR, Refugee Agency, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016, page 22, and Figure 8. http://www.unhcr.org/uk/statistics/unhcrstats/5943e8a34/global-trends-forced-displacement-2016.html (accessed on 29 June 2023). |
2 | All references to authors without dates refer to contributions in this Special Issue of the Humanities. |
3 | The numbers in square brackets within the dialogue reflect the passage of time during the original recorded conversation on 29 November 2022, which took one hour and twenty-four minutes. Not every single line of the conversation is included here. The original transcript of the dialogue has also been divided into sections, which allows the flow of ideas between the narrative text of the Introduction—which was pre-circulated to Marcia and Gera—and our conversation that engaged with it. |
4 | Paul Magee and Paul Collis in this Volume. |
5 | Viktor Frankl, based on his experience in concentration camps during World War II, explained the importance of having meaning in life even if one is in a very difficult situation, which is recorded in his book: (Frankl 2006). |
6 | ROUTES: Migration, Mobility, Displacement, is a research hub based at the University of Exeter: https://geography.exeter.ac.uk/routes/ (accessed on 29 June 2023). |
7 | Works that address the ‘Female voice’ and experience include: (Kennedy 2014; Kasimis 2020, 2021; Hillner 2019; Rubinstein 2018). |
8 | https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/ (accessed on 29 June 2023). |
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Isayev, E.; Jewell, E.; Gizaw, G.T.; Schenck, M.C. On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction. Humanities 2023, 12, 81. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040081
Isayev E, Jewell E, Gizaw GT, Schenck MC. On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction. Humanities. 2023; 12(4):81. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040081
Chicago/Turabian StyleIsayev, Elena, Evan Jewell, Gerawork Teferra Gizaw, and Marcia C. Schenck. 2023. "On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction" Humanities 12, no. 4: 81. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040081
APA StyleIsayev, E., Jewell, E., Gizaw, G. T., & Schenck, M. C. (2023). On Displacement and the Humanities—An Introduction. Humanities, 12(4), 81. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040081