Refugee Studies Centre: Recent Episodes
Refugee Studies Centre
The Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) aims to build knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of forced migration in order to help improve the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.
Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture 2015 | Innocence: understanding a political concept
With the grounding assumption that innocence plays a central role in the politics of forced migration and asylum, this lecture delves into the idea of innocence, trying to understand it and render its workings more legible, and arguing that it is a political – not simply a religious or moral – concept. By examining the figure of the child, the trafficked victim, the migrant, asylum seeker, the enemy combatant and the animal, Professor Ticktin suggests that innocence sets up hierarchies of humanity, all the while feeding an expanding politics of humanitarianism. Ultimately, she asks if innocence is a concept we want to protect.
About the speaker Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University, in co-tutelle with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to the New School, Miriam was an Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and also held a postdoctoral position in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.
Professor Ticktin's research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity. She has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2011; co-winner of the 2012 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology) and co-editor (with Ilana Feldman) of In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press, 2010), along with many other articles and book chapters. She is a founding editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Next year she will be a fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
Speaker:
Dr James Milner (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Carleton University)
Despite the attention paid to new examples of ‘global refugee policy’, we know surprisingly little about the process by which it is made and implemented. Building on the December 2014 special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies, this seminar introduces the concept of ‘global refugee policy’ and argues for a more critical and systematic examination of the interests and actors that shape the process of making and implementing policy. Drawing on efforts to implement global policy with respect to protracted refugee situations in the context of Tanzania, the seminar considers the range of national and local factors that limited efforts to realise naturalisation for Burundian refugees, and outlines an approach to the future study of global refugee policy.
About the speaker:
Dr Milner is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada, and a Research Associate with the Refugee Studies Centre. He has been a researcher, practitioner and policy advisor on issues relating to refugees, peacebuilding, African politics and the United Nations system. He was Co-Director of The PRS Project: Towards Solutions for Protracted Refugee Situations, an international RSC research project focusing on the plight of refugees in situations of prolonged exile in Africa and Asia.
In recent years, he has undertaken field research in Burundi, Guinea, Kenya, India, Tanzania and Thailand, and has presented research findings to stakeholders in New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere. He has worked as a Consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India, Cameroon, Guinea and its Geneva Headquarters. He is author of Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-author (with Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher) of UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications (UN University Press, 2008). Before joining Carleton University, he was an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto (2006-08) and a Trudeau Scholar at the University of Oxford (2003-06).
http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events/understanding-global-refugee-policy-the-case-of-naturalization-in-tanzania