(Re)Centering Midwest Refugee Resettlement and Home

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue seeks to center the lives of refugees and immigrants to better understand experiences of exile and migration and to provide a counternarrative to the dominant portrayals of refugees as overly dependent or agential, or immigrants as criminals. We especially welcome submissions from peripheral regions, places not considered to be gateway cities for refugee resettlement, for example, or places where immigrants and refugees are at once hypervisible and invisible, such as rural areas and small towns. How can we reframe such areas as part of a larger global imaginary of home in ways that expand our understanding of diversity and belonging?

We offer the Midwest United States as example. The “Midwest” is an arbitrary geographic term grounded in colonialism and European westward expansion in the United States. It is a site of stolen land, countless broken treaties between indigenous sovereign nations and the government of the United States, ongoing settler colonialism, and home to dozens of contemporary Native American nations. It was also an endpoint of the Great Migration for millions of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South, as well as immigrants and refugees from around the world who came to the Midwest seeking a better life. Following Halverson and Reno (2022), we view the Midwest as an “imagined middle space, less a real place or collection of places and more a screen onto which various conceptions of middle-ness and average-ness are projected.” This collection provides a way of centering real people in an effort to reclaim the middle west (and other marginalized, peripheral, or overlooked regions) as a global and diverse space that can serve as both a home and place of exile, of both freedom and constraint, promise and disappointment, inclusion and exclusion.

Therefore, we encourage submissions from disciplines including critical refugee studies, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, linguistics, literature, education, urban studies, ethnic studies, American studies, policy papers, and art. Submissions should be 6000–8000 words and can include images.

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Erickson
Guest Editor

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• Midwest
• refugees
• home
• exile
• counternarrative
• belonging