Critical Refugee Studies

Ma Vang

How do you teach a course on refugees that humanizes displaced peoples but not within the human rights framework? The global historical conditions that produce refugees represent some of the most pressing issues in our contemporary era, including colonialism and militarism, climate change, and the gender and sexual violence that undergird state violence. While the latest United Nations report for 2018 indicates that 70.8 million people are displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations, of which 138,600 are unaccompanied and separated children, these staggering statistical figures often present refugees as a problem to be solved.1 The UN and existing literature on refugees, then, deploy a problem-oriented approach to refugees to either resolve their displacement or understand the sociology of their (re)integration without addressing the structures of violence that produced their displacement in the first place. This Critical Refugee Studies course, designed and taught within a critical race and ethnic studies framework, works beyond the legal and sociological approaches to instead focus on stories and storytelling. The course approaches storytelling as a critical methodology for elevating refugee knowledge that decenters the human rights framework and the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of the refugee based on a “well-founded fear of persecution” that was geographically and historically bounded within Europe.2 Pedagogically, this means starting the course elsewhere, and with stories, to reframe the stakes of the refugee as a social actor and an idea that challenges political, social, and cultural notions of nation and citizenship.3 The stories invite relationality in students’ learning such that the framing of the refugee knowledge base humanizes refugees and engages students’ experiential and analytical knowledge. So while the course asks students to produce more traditional work through response papers and a midterm, a key product from the course is a final storytelling project to locate stories about refugees or forced migrations. The format of the storytelling project can be a story map, a blog post, or an archival artifact to be hosted on the Critical Refugee Studies website (criticalrefugeestudies.com). The refugee as an analytic and the method of storytelling open up course materials and classroom discussions around disparate issues such as war and imperialism, Palestine, climate change, and undocumented immigration. At the newest University of California (UC) campus with the largest number of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient students in the UC system and in the context of ongoing family separation and migrant detention at the US-Mexico border, the refugee has been a critical way to illuminate the convergence of state violence and militarism. Urgently, the refugee opens up ways to see displaced and/or migrant communities who are made invisible by constraining public discourses about terrorism or human rights. Instead, the course demonstrates that refugees’ “politics [and poetics] of living” through the production of knowledge and art are political acts.4

Critical Refugee Studies, CRES 121

University of California, Merced

Professor: Ma Vang

Course Overview

This course explores refugees not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques of colonization, war, human rights, and displacement. We will address questions such as, Who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? What are refugee stories about forced migration? The course will engage the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) to understand refugee experiences as linked to militarism and migration as well as feminist refugee epistemology. Additionally, we approach this study from the perspectives of communities, artists, and academic texts as critical sites of knowledge to forge new and humane dialogues and representations. We will move between the humanities and the social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and visual knowledge to illuminate the places where refugees create social, public, and collective living.

Learning Goal

To know, understand, and practice how policies/laws, data, maps, charts, definitions, treaties, media, art, stories, and other forms of discourse can avoid the objectification of refugees as the producers of those discourses attempt to illustrate crises and address refugee needs.5

Course Goals

By the end of the course, students should have a better grasp of the following:

Read and analyze academic, historical, and cultural texts about refugees.
Examine problem-oriented approaches to the humanitarian rescue and the study of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced and stateless human beings.
Cite and interpret key refugee and human rights situations and assess the approaches that have been used to resolve them.
Develop and use a critical refugee studies approach to understand refugee and human rights “crises.”
Engage with and articulate multidisciplinary questions about the comparative and relational topic of refugees.
Formulate possibilities for comprehending refugee concerns within and beyond the human rights framework.
Learn how to create refugee migration and story maps.

CRES PLOs

These course learning outcomes contribute to four of the five primary CRES Program Learning Outcomes:

Investigate the ways society can be centrally constituted by racial, ethnic, and Indigenous formations in global and historical contexts in preparation for a diverse society and international world.
Effectively articulate in oral and written form complex ideas about knowledge, power, and society.
Analyze how “race,” “ethnicity,” and/or indigeneity are historically and culturally specific (dependent on time and place), relational (not formed in isolation), and intersectional (informed by other social formations, such as class, gender, sexuality, etc.).
Develop and use theoretical knowledge in a discipline through a discipline-based theory course that can be used as a foundation for interdisciplinary research in race and ethnic studies.

Required Readings

*Note: You are required to complete the readings assigned before each class and to bring readings to class for our discussion.

Tang, Eric. 2015. Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto. New York: NYU Press.

Hyndman, Jennifer. 2000. Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

All other readings are available on https://registrar.ucmerced.edu/CatCourses in the Resources folder under Files. To access readings off campus, you will need to set up a VPN connection at http://library.ucmerced.edu/use/technology/vpn.

Course Requirements and Evaluations

*Note: You must complete all assignments in order to pass the course.

Attendance and Active Class Participation 20%

Attendance is mandatory. This is the easy part of your grade. You are allowed two absences (no questions asked). Each subsequent absence will result in minus 5% from your final grade. Participation is required and necessary to make the class successful for you and your peers. How to participate: come to class; read; bring readings to class; ask questions; respond to questions; take notes; and attend office hours.

Class Presentations 15%

Work with a partner to learn about a historical or current refugee, migration, or displacement group and/or event. Prepare a 10-minute presentation for the class to explain the group and/or event and connect it to two themes from that week’s readings or the class.

Three (3) Reading Journals (500-Word Papers) 15%

Papers are due at the beginning of class on Thursday. More directions for papers will be posted on CatCourses.

Midterm Exam 20%

Refugee Stories 30%

Your final project will focus on locating stories about refugees or forced migrations that will contribute to the existing story maps on the Critical Refugee Studies website.

Proposal for a refugee story (can be from your class presentation) 5%
Gather information about the story 10%
Write-up of story and include image or video 10%
Present refugee story in class 5%

Class Conduct

Respect: This class will challenge common understandings of refugees in relation to race, gender, sexuality, nation, and power. Given the nature of the course, there will likely be a range of opinions. A good classroom environment should stimulate you to think for yourself, challenge paradigms, and raise critical questions. Please keep in mind, however, that we must engage each other in a respectful and considerate manner. Abusive and harsh language, intimidation, and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Digital Etiquette: All personal electronics should be off or on “silent” mode. Texting, games, schoolwork not pertaining to class, and social media (Facebook, YouTube, email, etc.) are not permitted. (This does not mean that I don’t allow laptops, but they must be used to take notes, to refer to your notes, or for class activities.) Audio and video recordings are strictly prohibited in class.

Academic Integrity: Plagiarism is a serious violation, whether intentional or inadvertent. All work submitted in this course must be your own and original. The use of sources such as ideas, quotations, paraphrases, or anything written by someone else must be properly acknowledged and cited. Plagiarism is when you use someone else’s words without attribution; it includes using portions of a previously published work or website in a paper without citing the source, submitting a paper written for another course, submitting a paper written by someone else, and using the ideas of someone else without attribution. If you have questions about the proper citation of sources, please discuss them with me or consult UCM’s Office of Student Conduct website: http://studentlife.ucmerced.edu/content/uc-conduct-standards.

Accommodations: University of California, Merced, is committed to creating learning environments that are accessible to all. If you anticipate or experience physical or academic barriers based on a disability, please feel welcome to contact me privately so we can discuss options. In addition, please contact Student Accessibility Services (SAS) at (209) 228-6996 or disabilityservices@ucmerced.edu as soon as possible to explore reasonable accommodations. All accommodations must have prior approval from Student Accessibility Services on the basis of appropriate documentation.

If you anticipate or experience barriers due to pregnancy, temporary medical condition, or injury, please feel welcome to contact me so we can discuss options. You are encouraged to contact the Dean of Students for support and resources at (209) 228-3633 or https://studentaffairs.ucmerced.edu/dean-students.

Also, if you prefer to be called by a different name or to be referred to by a different gender than what appears on your enrollment record, please feel free to notify me.

Majoring in CRES at UCM

Many students take a CRES course because the topic is of great interest or because of a need to fulfill a GE or other college requirement. Often students have taken multiple classes out of interest or for GE and don’t realize how close they are to a major or even a double major. A CRES major is excellent preparation for a career in teaching, higher education, law, public policy, government and politics, journalism, education, public health, social work, and many other careers. If you would like information about the CRES major at UCM, please contact SSHA Advising at ssha.advising@ucmerced.edu. Or you can find your assigned advisor at https://ssha-advising.ucmerced.edu/meet-your-advisor.

Schedule of Readings and Discussions

Unit 1: Critical Refugee Studies and Knowledge Formation

Week 1: Introduction: Who Is a Refugee?

Tuesday

Introduction

Thursday

Colin Toibin, “The Barber of Barcelona,” in From the Republic of Conscience: Stories Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Liberties Press, 2009), pp. 117–22.

Anita Casavantes Bradford, “Immigrants, Refugees, and American Family Values: A Historical Reckoning,” July 16, 2018, blog post on Critical Refugee Studies website, https://criticalrefugeestudies.com/resources/blog/immigrants-refugees-and-american-family-values-a-historical-reckoning.

Week 2: Refugee Flight and Migration

Tuesday

Eric Tang, Unsettled, ch. 1.

Thursday

Mohamed Abumaye, “Dadaab Kenya: Policing the Refugee Camp,” Sept. 26, 2017, blogpost on Critical Refugee Studies website, http://criticalrefugeestudies.com/resources/blog/dadaab-kenya-policing-the-refugee-camp.

Henry A. J. Ramos, “Introduction & Carmen Alegría,” in The Flight to Freedom: The Story of Central American Refugees in California (Arte Público Press, 2006), pp. xvii–16.

Week 3: Critical Refugee Perspectives

Tuesday

Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (Faber and Faber, 1994), 110–19.

Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” Open 15 (2008), pp. 90–95.

Thursday

Yen Le Espiritu & Lan Duong, “Feminist Refugee Epistemology: Reading Displacement in Vietnamese and Syrian Refugee Art,” Signs 43, no. 3 (2018).

Explore Critical Refugee Studies website

Unit 2: Rights and Refuge

Week 4: Human Rights

Tuesday

Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement, Introduction & ch. 1, pp. xv–xxix & pp. 1–28.

Thursday

Sarah Kyambi, “National Identity and Refugee Law,” in Critical Beings: Law, Nation and the Global Subject, ed. Peter Fitzpatrick and Patricia Tuitt (Ashgate, 2004).

Week 5: Immigration and Refugee Policies

Tuesday

Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, “Current Challenges in Refugee Law,” in Exploring the Boundaries of Refugee Law: Current Protection Challenges (Brill, 2015), pp. 9–28.

Thursday

Eric Tang, Unsettled, ch. 2.

Daniel Solomon, “A Lost Boy in Louisville: One Refugee’s Story,” Dissent 63, no. 1 (2016), pp. 117–26.

*Reading Journal #1 Due

Unit 3: Colonialism, War, and Gendered Sexual Displacement

Week 6: Colonialism and War

Tuesday

Derek Gregory, “Barbed Boundaries,” in The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Blackwell, 2010).

R. T. “Waiting: Life under Israel-Occupied Palestine,” March 15, 2018, blog post on the Critical Refugee Studies website, https://criticalrefugeestudies.com/resources/blog/waiting-life-under-israel-occupied-palestine.

Thursday

Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The World of War,” in How to See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More (Basic Books, 2016), pp. 97–124.

Week 7: Gender and Sexual Violence

Tuesday

Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement, ch. 3.

Thursday

David A. B. Murray, “Real Queer: ‘Authentic’ LGBT Refugee Claimants and Homonationalism in the Canadian Refugee System,” Anthropologica 56, no. 1 (2014): 21–32.

Jacqueline Castel, “Race, Sexual Assault, and the Meaning of Persecution,” International Journal of Refugee Law 4, no. 1 (1992), pp. 39–56.

Week 8

Tuesday

Midterm

Thursday

Film

Unit 4: Refugees of the War on Terror and Climate Change

Week 9: Are Refugees Terrorists?

Tuesday

Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007), pp. 148–61.

Jennifer Epstein and Justin Stink, “Trump Admits He Has ‘No Proof’ Terrorists Are in the Migrant Caravan,” Time, October 23, 2018.

Kathy Gilsinan, “Trump Keeps Invoking Terrorism to Get His Border Wall,” The Atlantic, December 11, 2018.

Thursday

Ma Vang, “The Terrorist Ally: The U.S. Government’s Case against Hmong Refugee Leader General Vang Pao,” work in progress, pp. 1–36.

Spring Break

Week 10: Climate Change and Environmental Racism

Tuesday

Robert P. Marzec, “Climate Change War Games,” in Militarizing the Pacific (2016), pp. 1–29.

Thursday

Shweta Jayawardhan, “Vulnerability and Climate Change Induced Human Displacement,” Consilience, no. 17 (2017), pp. 103–42.

*Reading Journal #2 Due

Unit 5: Feminist Refugee Epistemologies

Week 11: Critical Refugee Studies Conference: April 13, 2019

Tuesday

Guest Speaker: Pos Moua (Hmong American poet)

Thursday

No Class, Attend Critical Refugee Studies Conference on Saturday

Week 12: (Re)mapping Refugees

Tuesday

Alison Mountz, “Where Asylum-Seekers Wait: Feminist Counter-topographies of Sites between States,” Gender, Place and Culture 18, no. 3 (2011), pp. 381–99.

In-Class: Refugee Stories Progress Report: Identify a story and come up with a plan to gather information

Thursday

Jess Bier, “Where Cartographies Collide,” in Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge (MIT Press, 2017), pp. 1–33.

Week 13: Mothering, Children and Family Separations

Tuesday

Eric Tang, Unsettled, ch. 6.

In-Class: Story Map Progress Report: Complete gathering information

Thursday

Leisy Abrego, “How Children Fare,” Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders (Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 133–58.

*Reading Journal #3 Due

Week 14: Refugee Literature and Art

Tuesday

Attend 50th anniversary of Ethnic Studies event

Thursday

Selections from Mai Der Vang, Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017).

Shannon Gibney, Dream Country, Part I (Dutton Books, 2018).

Week 15: Refugee Stories

Tuesday

Finish story map project and presentations

Thursday

Presentations on your projects

Ma Vang is an assistant professor and founding chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her forthcoming book, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies, examines how secrecy structures both official knowledge and refugee epistemologies about militarism and forced migration. She is the coeditor of Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and her writings have been published in positions: asia critique and MELUS. With a UC Multicampus Research grant, she is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, which aims to ethically reconceptualize refugee lifeworlds to make apparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement. She serves as coeditor of its website, which hosts the refugee archive and story map platforms for refugees to share stories. She is also actively engaged with student and community organizations.

Notes

1. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018,” UNHCR, June 19, 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/5d08d7ee7.pdf.

2. “Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” UNHCR, December 2010, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/3b66c2aa10.

3. Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

4. Le Espiritu, 51.

5. The course learning goal was adapted from the Critical Refugee Studies website, “Our Collective Work,” accessed December 11, 2019, https://criticalrefugeestudies.com.