Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: American Ethnological Society

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Immigration/Migration/Citizenship

Secondary Theme: Policy

(4-1055) Coping with Displacement: Experiences of Forced Migration, Conflict, and Uncertainty

With nearly twenty people unwillingly displaced every minute because of conflict or persecution, forced migration is one of the fast-growing challenges in the world (UNHCR 2017). Human suffering and moral imperatives to alleviate it largely shape public and academic discourses that underpin emergency responses and trigger intellectual critique of humanitarian governance. This strengthens the conventional perceptions of unsettled people as the objects of care and victims. However, anthropological perspective can challenge this understanding, exploring what can be learned from the migrants’ experiences of unexpected mobility as well as confinement, conflict, and uncertainty.

This panel introduces papers that critically discuss how displaced people actively cope with forced migration, and how they navigate changing environments and landscapes. The central theme of the panel calls to shift the anthropological focus from studying the “suffering subjects” (Robbins 2013, also Ortner 2016, Ticktin 2014) to proactive responses and agency of those affected.

Among the central themes of the panel are: strategies and everyday tactics that forced migrants employ in response to displacement; understandings of security, belonging, and home in times of raising walls and increased forced im/mobility; responses to regulatory policies and informal practices of belonging under protracted displacement and conflict; navigation of unpredictability and ambivalence; strategies of resilience and flexibility; transformations of social identities and migrants’ self-making.

Discussant(s)

• Rebecca Bryant

  London School of Economics

Chair(s)

• Deborah Jones

  Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Organizer(s)

• Tetiana Bulakh

  Indiana University Bloomington

Presenter(s)

• Tetiana Bulakh

  Indiana University Bloomington

Organizer(s)

• Gorkem Aydemir Kundakci

  George Washington University

Presenter(s)

• Gorkem Aydemir Kundakci

  George Washington University

• Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi

  Assistant Professor
  Saint Paul University

• Michele Bianchi

  Ph.D Candidate
  Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary

• Jill Koyama

  Associate Professor
  University of Arizona

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Controlled Citizenship of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Ukraine: Lived Experiences and Coping Strategies
  Tetiana Bulakh – Indiana University Bloomington
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Contingent Homes: Displacement, Return, and Modes of Crossings in the Disputed Georgia-Abkhazia Borderland
  Gorkem Aydemir Kundakci – George Washington University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Coping with Displacement and Dispossession: The Roma Minorities in Tirana
  Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi – Saint Paul University
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Memories of Displacement and Politics of Belonging in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)
  Michele Bianchi – Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  World Switching: Navigating Spaces and Negotiating the Self in the U.S.
  Jill P. Koyama – University of Arizona
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Discussion
  Rebecca E. Bryant – London School of Economics