Archive for the ‘north america’ Category

Interview with Rabiya Kadeer

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Rebiya Kadeer in Washington DC.

The film ‘Lost Nation: Stories from the Uyghur Diaspora’ now includes an interview with Rabiya Kadeer. Ms Kadeer had been a successful business woman in China before her views on human rights issues caused her to be imprisoned by the Chinese authorities. Ms Kadeer left China in 2005 for the United States where she is now the president of both the World Uyghur Congress and Uyghur American Association, becoming the most prominent Uyghur in the world today.

In this recording Rabiya Kadeer talks about how and why she left China and her hopes for the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (East Turkistan).

Guatemalan refugees: Online photo exhibition and podcast

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Exhibition poster featuring a photograph of Juana and Angelina, the oldest mid-wives of La Gloria, a former Guatemalan refugee settlement in Chiapas, Mexico. Photo: Manuel Gil.

The photographic exhibition Guatemalan forced migration: the politics of care in representing refugees explores the mechanisms of representation used for forced migrants that stage appropriate refugee identities to justify the need for humanitarian care. The exhibition explores these issues through photo-documentary work with indigenous Guatemalan forced migrants living in the former refugee camp of La Gloria in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. The project is a collaboration between photographer, Manuel Gil, and doctoral research student in Sociology, Óscar F. Gil-García.

The photos and descriptions are now available to view on Forced Migration Online. The photos are complemented with a podcast in which Óscar F. Gil-García is interviewed about his work on the project.

Voices from Afghanistan

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

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.

Forced Migration Online Podcast 2: Professor Elizabeth Colson

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

Photo of Professor Elizabeth Colson. Cambridge, April 2006. © Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge University, www.alanmacfarlane.com

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.