The latest podcast in a series recorded at the bi-annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) is now available online.
The third plenary event included a panel discussion ‘Regions at the Crossroads: Transregional Forced Migration’ chaired by Susan Martin, with presentations by Mark Schlakman, Aicha Belarbi, Jeffrey Crisp and Ahmet Icduygu and Susan Kneebone.
The latest podcast in a series recorded at the bi-annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) is now available online.
The second plenary event began with the keynote address ‘Palestine refugees in the contemporary context: a view from UNRWA’ by Karen Abu Zayd, Commissioner General of UNRWA, followed by a panel discussion ‘The situation of refugees in the Middle East’ chaired by Maysa Ayoub, and including Helen Young, Patricia Fagen and Shahira Samy.
As part of the London International Documentary Film Festival (29th March – 5th April 2008) will be screenings of four films were screened on the topic of forced migration.
October 2000, Cochabamba, Bolivia. Carmen, a young single mother, faces a life-changing catastrophe when her nine-year-old daughter is badly injured in a bus accident.
Unable to pay the hospital bills and for specialized care, Carmen makes the dangerous journey to the US to work illegally, staying for 6 years to raise what she believes will be enough money to support her daughter for life.
But when she returns home to Bolivia she discovers her savings are nowhere near enough. Should she stay with her ailing daughter, or make the perilous journey back to the US for a second time?
A portrait of the human side of the current immigration crisis in America.
Tickets £7/£6 Curzon members
Box office: 0871 703 3991, Renoir Cinema
A group of Ecuadorean immigrants in Madrid. They came to Spain to work, to support their families, but they desperately want to go home.
But if they go to Ecuador to visit their families, they know they will never again be able to get back to Madrid to work.
In the overcrowded housing estates of North Melbourne lives a young African woman, an Oromo, forced to leave her beloved homeland and family in fear of persecution.
Now she is reunited with her daughters, after more than six years enforced separation. The family must adjust to living together again in a new country.
What is a woman willing to do to make a better life for her children? Norma, a Latin American immigrant in Barcelona, struggles with the pain of solitude, forced to live away from her family in order to support them.
Tickets £3.00
Box office: 0207 323 8181, British Museum
For full programme see the LIDF08 website.
Bhutanese Refugees is a new website which is a collaboration between PhotoVoice and the Bhutanese Refugee Support Group, who have both have worked closely with Bhutanese refugees. The website includes audio and video of refugees telling their personal stories.
Situated between the emerging superpowers of India and China, the isolated Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, hailed by some as ‘the last Shangri-La’, has generated one of the highest numbers of refugees in the world in proportion to its population.
Since 1991 over one sixth of Bhutan’s peoples have sought asylum in Nepal, India and other countries around the world.
Afghani Portraits by Sherry Tompalski and Graham Thompson uses “painted portraits, timelapse photography and edited voice tracks” to tell the stories of Afghan refugees now living in Canada.
Between January 6th and 10th 2008, the 11th International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) conference was hosted by the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program of the American University in Cairo. The Forced Migration Online team attended to participate and record audio at the plenary events for the FMO podcast series. Details of the podcasts will be have been posted on this blog in the next few weeks.
Our conference round-up begins with a video review of the event produced by the IASFM rapporteur John Nassari. The video is a part of the rapporteur’s conference report, along with a more traditional oral report which was delivered in the final plenary session of the conference. The video report features participants reading quotes which were originally spoken by others during the conference.
The film Playing Between Elephants is now available to view online. The film was produced by Aryo Danusiri, Bruno Dercon and UN-HABITAT and has just won the Human Rights Award at the Jakarta International Film Festival 2007. It documents a post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, where an international body that is assigned to build houses, while an Acehnese village chief leads his people through the ups and downs of the ongoing reconstruction and rehabilitation process. The film very intimately shows how complicated it is to survive a traumatic event and then experience global intervention. Rebuilding a house in post-tsunami Aceh brings into play the whole world and forces the Acehnese people learn to deal with the friction between the global and local realms.
Whilst FMO is continuing to expand it’s video section, YouTube is undoubtedly the most popular repository of videos on the Internet (accounting for more than 60% of all videos watched online in the US). Although it might be written off by some as only having entertainment value, there are in fact many individuals and organisations who are using YouTube (and other video sharing services) to broadcast their message to the world. Searching the YouTube website can often uncover films about forced migration, not only from FMO, but key organisations such as UNHCR (FMO is not responsible for the content of external web sites).
In this podcast Professor Elizabeth Colson is in conversation with Dr Anna Schmidt. Elizabeth Florence Colson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in anthropology addresses politics, religion, social organisation, social change, migration, anthropological history, and theory and the ethnography of Africa and North America. Colson is best know for her field work with the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia which began in 1956, through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as a control study of the social change caused by forced resettlement. All of Colson’s work is solidly anchored in ethnography and through it she has made theoretical contributions to the subdisciplines of applied development and political anthropology. Colson was also one of a group of academics that played an important role in consolidating the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford in its early years, working closely with the former director, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and the development officer at the time, Belinda Allan. Dr Anna Schmidt is a political scientist who gained her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
The film Youth as Evaluators: Contested Spaces and Identity is now available to view online. In this documentary, young people talk about their countries and the issues that young people face there. The documentary was filmed during a gathering of young people involved in Public Achievement and similar programmes around the world (including South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Finland, Netherlands, and Northern Ireland) at the Corrymeela Centre, Ballycastle, Northern Ireland 11 - 22 August 2005. The focus of the event was on training participants as evaluators of their youth programmes at home, and on creating an international network of young people interested in improving young people’s experience of being civic co-creators.