The hyper-focus on refugee suffering, desperation, and neediness in media and social science scholarship have represented refugees as passive recipients of western generosity and increasingly as the targets of racial profiling, surveillance, and detention. This seminar invites participants to chart new approaches to refugee studies that integrate theoretical rigor and policy concerns with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds—approaches that fuse the critical and the creative.

Joining the fields of transnational feminist studies with critical refugee studies, this talk introduces the concept feminist refugee epistemology (FRE) to re-conceptualize war-based displacement as not only about social disorder and interruption but also about social reproduction and innovation. FRE does more than critique Western media representation of refugees; it underlines the refugees' rich and complicated lives, the ways in which they enact their hopes, beliefs, and politics, even when they live militarized lives.

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. 

Jennifer Nash is an Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her research centers on black feminist theories; black sexual politics; race, gender, and law; race, gender, and visual culture; and women's/gender/sexuality studies' institutional histories and politics.