Articles
5/31/19, The Guardian: UN calls for evacuation of Libyan refugees amid ‘dire’ conditions
5/31/19, The Guardian: ‘I wouldn’t be the refugee, I’d be the girl who kicked ass’: how taekwondo made me, Dina Nayeri
5/30/19, WBUR: Federal Restrictions Lure Nepalese Refugees Away From Vermont
5/29/19, New York Times: Reporting on the Retirees Making Migrants’ Journeys a Little Easier
“At the monastery, there were volunteers wearing hearing aids, some who appeared to have suffered strokes and others who had endured hip replacements. Most did not speak Spanish. But nothing had held them back from pitching in. Among them were nurses, physicians, scientists and teachers, using their training or not, to assist the 300 or so migrants accommodated at the monastery each night.
“You can’t get into the rhetoric; it’s about humanity,” said a volunteer named Frank Sagona, 64.”
5/29/19, Gothamist: Hundreds Of Immigrants Detained At Southern Border Brought To NYC-Area Jails
5/28/19, The Guardian: Sicily’s ‘doctor of migrants’ bucks far-right trend to win seat in EU elections
5/28/19, Spectrum News: Helping Refugees Stitch Together a New Life
5/28/19, NPR: Extending ‘Zero Tolerance’ To People Who Help Migrants Along The Border
5/28/19, The Nation: Take Action Now: Look Beyond Trump’s Wall
5/26/19, New York Times: A Migrant Family Takes a Greyhound Across America
“A Greyhound road trip across the country has long been a hallmark of the American experience, a “leave the driving to us” way for those who couldn’t afford airfare or a car to come home from college, start new jobs, get to the coast, leave problematic situations behind.
But along the border and deep into parts of the nation’s interior, the Greyhound buses plying the interstate highway system have become an essential element in an extraordinary new migration.”
5/24/19, New York Times: In Shift, Trump Will Pick Kenneth Cuccinelli to Oversee Legal Immigration
5/24/19, Immigration Impact: U.S. Policies Make It Harder for Mexican Graduates to Participate Fully in the Workforce
Opinion
5/31/19, New York Times: Seeking Refuge, Legally, and Finding Prison
“Prolonged detention magnifies the most dehumanizing elements of the migrant experience — the commodification of bodies that occurs as migrants are trafficked, the dangers they endure along our militarized border and the criminalization thrust upon them from the moment they cross it. All of that is concentrated within the walls of the detention center. The women I meet feel this keenly. “I hope I can soon leave these four walls,” they tell me, because within them, “it’s like we are animals.””
5/29/19, The Hill: Government surveillance of social media related to immigration more extensive than you realize
5/29/19, New York Times: To Stop Border Crossings, the U.S. Made the Journey Deadlier (interactive, multimedia)
5/28/19, The Hill: ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy pushes asylum seekers into grave danger
5/28/19, Miami Herald: Massive detention facilities for migrant youth are failing
5/24/19, USA Today: ‘That could have been me’: 13-year-old on Guatemalan teen refugee who died in US custody
Publications
5/29/19, RSC Public Seminar Series: Sonopolis: Sound, citizenship, and migrant activisms in Athens | Dr Tom Western (podcast)
At protest marches in Athens, where people gather to voice dissent at the violence of asylum regimes, the chants have shifted from ‘Open the Borders’ to ‘Open the City’. Border struggles become urban struggles. Athens once again becomes a polis – a centre of political action – and people use sound to make claims on belonging at street level. This paper does two things. First, it listens to these migrant activisms, focussing on sound as a way of understanding citizenship – of hearing inclusion and exclusion. The city is a testing ground (or maybe dumping ground) for European experiments in border management, but is also a sounding board for solidarity, a resonance chamber for resistance. Second, it reports on a collaborative sound recording project, working with refugee-led organisations and people who resist refugeeness. Together we run workshops on the city and citizenship, using sound as a heuristic and a catalyst for narration: opening creative engagements with representing displacement; and distorting the dominant tropes of ‘European refugee crisis’. We focus on everyday sensory experiences and performances of citizenship in protracted displacement. In the sonopolis, vocabularies of integration are reclaimed, disrupting the moral authority of NGOs to speak on behalf of those who have crossed borders. In the sonopolis, migrant activisms open ways of rethinking citizenship altogether.
3/7/19, International Communication Gazette: Framing the migration: A study of news photographs showing people fleeing war and persecution (paywalled)