This paper engages with the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon and, specifically, considers how queer-identified Syrians navigate an often-hostile environment in and around the Lebanese capital Beirut. Drawing on hospitality as a philosophical concept and on the sociological notion of the stranger, this paper focuses on discourses and aspirations these refugees express, in terms of language and bodily practices, in the face of what many experience as “hardened borders” within the social fabric of the host country. 

"Writing from El Nié: Racexile and the Poetics of Dominicanidad in Diaspora"
Through a historicized reading of Dominican literature of exile and diaspora, this talk explores the ways diasporic Dominican blacks interpellate the nation(s) and archives, reclaiming el nié—neither here nor there— a space of belonging.

Jennifer Ho will discuss concepts relating to the ambiguity of race—the ways in which our understanding of racial categories exceeds the boundaries society places around them, particularly by looking at Asian Americans who cannot be neatly typed into boxes: those who are multiracial, transracial adoptees, and existing as an Asian body at a time when race is often talked about in black and white terms.

Please join us for a discussion with Cathy Schlund-Vials, Professor in the Department of English and the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at at the University of Connecticut.

This seminar will focus on recent and ongoing academic projects which repeatedly examine moments of dislocation, rupture, and movement, and reflect “global” migrations between the fields of critical Asian and comparative Asia American studies.

This talk examines the role disability plays in the making of refugee subjects; such subjects, as this presentation maintains, are necessarily situated in catastrophic environs formed in the troubling aftermaths of war, natural disaster, and economic crisis. To access the various man-made mechanisms responsible for bringing these disabled subjects "into being," this talk strategically utilizes the following schema: "prosthetic ecologies." "Prosthetic ecologies" operates as a flexible and generative analytic upon which to syncretically chart longue durée histories of state-sanctioned violence, state-authorized violation, and internationally-supported contravention during the Cold War era. 

We Still Live Here, a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace, tells the story of the return of the Wampanoag language. The film interweaves the present-day story Wampanoags reclaiming their language with historical events that silenced the language for more than a century and obliterated much of their culture – epidemics, missionary pressures, land loss, and the indenture of Native children.