Description | Registration required: bit.ly… This webinar launches the Winter Quarter theme, “Comparative Humanitarianisms.” Elena Fiddian Qasmiyeh “Shifting the Gaze: Southern-led Humanitarian Responses to Displacement” Displacement is primarily a ‘Southern’ and ‘South-South’ phenomenon, to which Southern actors have historically responded in ways that resist, reject and provide alternatives to the hegemonic aid regime. However, Southern-led responses to displacement have typically been rendered invisible, and are largely unacknowledged by Northern- and Northern-based academics, policy-makers and practitioners. Though scholarly study of Southern actors’ responses to displacement has recently increased, Northern academics and policy observers too frequently delegitimize the activities of Islamic faith-based organizations and “non-traditional” donor states, which are not members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait). In this presentation, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh focuses on responses to Syrian displacement since 2011 and develops a multiscalar analysis of the roles played by Southern states, local host communities, faith-based networks and refugees themselves. She argues that a focus on “refugee-refugee humanitarianism” can challenge dominant and exclusionary Northern humanitarianism paradigms of refugee studies. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at University College London, where she directs the Refuge in a Moving World interdisciplinary research network. She is author of several articles and books, and co-editor of Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys Across Disciplines (UCL Press, 2020). More information about the series at bit.ly/humanitarianisms Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Simpson Center for the Humanities, and The Graduate School. Cosponsored by the Middle East Center, the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by January 11, 2021 to Caitlin Palo, 206-685-5260, scevents@uw.edu. |
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