Thanks for joining us in this panel part of
the intersections initiative by
the college diversity committee.
Today, we have three guests that are going to talk for
their own work and interests in research about migration.
The structure for this is I'm going to be introducing
the speaker who's going
to present for around seven minutes or so,
and I'm going to introduce the next speaker who was
going to do the same, and then afterwards,
there's going to be around 30 minutes for
open discussion and for you to ask
questions and have a conversation with the speakers.
We're going to start today with Rachel Weaver.
Rachel Lynn Weaver is an artist working across video,
sound, installation, and performance.
Her project is explore the intersections of
personal and cultural memory, narrative, and ecology.
Weaver's art work has been exhibited in 39 countries over
the last decade and it's held
the numerous private and public collections.
Since 2008, Weaver has also worked closely with
indigenous communities facing displacement
due to climate change,
environmental degradation,
and industrial and governmental land annexation.
She's currently partnering with
Alaskan native, Greenlandic,
and Canadian First Nations' leaders to
facilitate youth-led media projects.
Weaver is an assistant professor and director of
creative technologies programs at
the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. Thank you.
I guess it's my turn.
Do I have to hold the microphone?
No, I don't think so.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that there either.
Just asking for trouble.
I was looking forward to my Beyonce moment,
but I suppose I'll just start by saying,
thank you so much for the opportunity.
I'm really excited to share
a little bit about the work that I'm doing today.
We're going to test the range on this clicker here.
Just to start out, I'd like to frame the work that I
do with a little bit of context in mind.
Specifically, I am not
a sociologist nor am I a member of a native community.
I am a person who comes from
a context of complicated intersectional,
geographic, and class realities.
I was raised primarily at
Alaskan and Appalachian rural communities.
I am a filmmaker,
but I'm also a video artist.
I work in sound,
media installation, and community collaboration.
There are a range of different
thematic and research centerings
that motivate the work that I do.
Over a decade now, that has
included working very closely with
Alaskan native communities and
indigenous communities in a number of Arctic countries,
as well as in Central America towards thinking about
media sovereignty and
media representation of displacement.
In addition to that, that has meant
collaborating with and working very
closely with communities towards the creation of
new media projects that
reflect the narratives that
those communities want to center.
I'm going to talk a little bit about that work
today and then depending on timing later on,
I'll provide some context
for the creative practice itself.
To give you a little bit of additional background,
my media career began in
forensic science and then moved from
forensic documentation and investigation
to straight ahead documentary filmmaking.
Right away I began thinking about the authority of image,
who controls the way that communities are represented,
the history of documentary,
and the way the documentary has been used to position or
otherwise support or misrepresent
communities that are imperiled
in one way, shape, or form.
Growing up in areas that don't
have a lot of regional media production, that is to say,
far from very large cities,
far from urban infrastructures that support mediation and
media production and yet
seeing these regions in the media again and again.
I started to think about authority
and control and power representation.
Additionally, I grew really disenfranchised with
my traditional documentary work where I was often sent
to indigenous communities or to
marginalized communities and expected
to work in a hit and
run capacity where my role as
a filmmaker was to capture a very particular story,
leave, and never return.
That work was really at odds with the ethic of
care that I wanted to bring to the work that I was doing.
There was also no shortage of media,
misrepresentation of communities that
I was familiar with.
For example, images such as this one perpetuated
by TV series that
focus on the extremes of architect landscapes,
the romanticization and ridiculousness of
that media space neglects the complexity of those places.
I also started to think of culture mining as another type
of extractive industry along
the lines of the extractive industries
that were so prevalent
in the regions that I was based in.
I decided, okay, I'm not going to work in that way.
Instead I wanted to turn my attention to
complexity and instead of oversimplification,
finding ways to center the complexity
of the regions that I
called home and that I worked with them.
There are 231 distinct tribal entities in Alaska and
20 federally-recognized languages from
a number of different language groups.
That's a much more diverse vision
of that region than this one.
I wanted to return
to accurate representation and
portrayal of these communities.
Let me go back here.
In addition to the fact that these are
very complex societies that I'm working within,
indigenous mobility has transformed in
the region over the last 50-75 years.
That's due to a number of different factors
including desire,
so central governments in
addition to the complicated fact that
many communities that had been forcibly moved have
been done so without consent.
Forced resettlement is a story
that has happened again and again
in the history of indigenous
communities around the world,
but that continued up until
very recently in North America.
There's also a problem of brain drain in those regions,
out-migration of young people seeking
economic and educational opportunities
only to never return to their home communities.
There are a number of different factors
impacting what we think of migration.
In addition to that, climate change has
complicated the migratory story
of indigenous communities.
There are 200 plus Alaskan native villages
facing risks of flooding and erosion,
31 of them are facing an imminent displacement.
That means that these are communities
that have to relocate
or their villages will be completely destroyed.
At least 12 of the 31 highly threatened communities
are already in the process of negotiating relocation.
[NOISE] Climigration is one
of the terms that's been used to
describe this type of movement.
This is a term that was
first used in Alaska native human rights
work surrounding several communities that have already
been forcibly moved and had
to move because of climate change.
[NOISE] These are the stories
and things that we hear about,
but that may seem very far away from lower 48 reality is.
That is to say, those of us who are not living
in the Arctic in a day to day capacity.
This is a quote from a woman
named Allison Nayokpuk in Shishmaref, Alaska,
which is a village that is
three-quarters of the way we're located right now,
and it's in the process of trying to
raise funds to relocate because
to relocate an entire community is extremely expensive.
"If we relocate during the summer,
we'd need a lot of barges to move everything.
The thought of moving our village is very sad
because Shishmaref is the place where I grew up.
Shishmaref is a great place to
live because everybody knows each other.
If we move, it would probably
bring our community closer together.
It could be the totally opposite though,
because some people might just move to a new place.
If we move, it won't be the same because
it wouldn't be the Shishmaref that everyone knows."
So continuing negotiation of what it will mean to move.
[NOISE] I enter and negotiate this story of
communities that are imperiled by
both climate transformation and
also by histories of colonization and racism.
By thinking about what it means to be
a stakeholder and media sovereignty, that is to say,
the sovereign determination of
those individuals as to how they would
like to be represented in the media.
I have decided that facilitation and
trust are long-term investments.
They require long-term maintenance
and long-term commitments.
I don't work in a hit and run
capacity in my filmmaking anymore.
That has meant that I commit to partnerships with
communities beyond just a single creative project.
I also tried to remain accountable to communities.
That means that I need to be transparent.
I need to be honest,
and I need to work very closely with
leadership and youth in those communities.
I'm going to quickly talk about Belkofski,
which is one of the villages that
I worked with very closely,
which is a community that suffered
forced relocation essentially due to
economic forces and the lack of
social services in the region that they were based in.
Villagers had to leave their traditional home because
of economic instability and climate instability.
But they returned to
their traditional village regionally every year,
every season to participate in subsistence food ways,
to participate in religious ceremonies,
because the large church that was
the community's Russia Orthodox Center of
Worship was still based there.
This was a place that people return to.
But unfortunately, because the village was depopulated,
it was prone to danger and
the entire village site was burned by arsonists in 2013.
This community lost the majority
of the physical material,
all the architectural structures,
and a lot of the artifacts and artwork
and archives that were important to them.
My role as a filmmaker,
working very closely with this community,
was one of negotiating
the remaining memories that community members held,
while also having to come to terms with and find space
for and elevate the complexity
and poetics of the experience of displacement,
the experience of yearning to
go back to a place and return to a place that
physically no longer existed
that had been burned to the ground.
[NOISE] Go back. There we go.
We produced a film.
I facilitated media training for the community.
They shot interviews with all of their community elders.
In 2017, we released a feature length film that was
distributed at no cost to the entire community.
It's now a member of Alaskan institutions.
It's been distributed to other villages and it's
held in a number of collections in
urban centers as well because urban centers have
become very important to the indigenous community.
I'm going to stop there because there's
a whole lot more than I could say,
but I want to make room and time for
the other conversations. Thank you.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Do you want to trade places?
Thank you Rachel.
I'll queue up your presentation.
Okay. Thank you
There you go.
Thank you.
Now we're going to listen to Katrina Powell.
Dr. Katrina Powell is a professor of English and
Director of the Center for
Rhetoric and Society at Virginia Tech.
She teaches courses in rhetorics of social justice,
autobiography, and research methodologies.
Her research focuses on displacement narratives and
human rights rhetorics across transnational contexts.
She's the author of
The Anguish of Displacement by UVA Press
2007 and Identity and
Power in Narratives of Displacement,
Routledge 2015, also editor of "Answer at Once":
Letters of Mountain Families in
Shenandoah National Park, UVA 2009,
and Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive
and Ethically Responsible Research, Hampton 2012.
Her current work focuses on
the dissemination of displacement and
refugee narratives and the ethical dimensions of
our carving those narratives and alternative spaces.
With support from the non-profit boards of witness,
Powell is conducting an oral history titled "Resettled",
beginning again in Appalachia to be published by
Haymarket Books. Thank you.
Thank you. Anthony, Rachel,
and Georgeta, thank you for inviting us to be here.
You can probably tell from the description of my work,
how excited I was when Rachel joined the faculty here.
She and I have a lot of common interests.
In fact, some of the collages that she worked on,
was it this particular community?
It was.
Are hanging in the Center for Rhetoric
in Society which I direct.
Those are lovely pieces
for everyone to see and to learn about.
I want to do a similar thing to Rachel,
just to tell you a little bit about my past research,
to then give you some context
for what I'm working on right now.
My first book was about displacement
of families from Shenandoah National Park
here in Virginia.
How many people have been to Shenandoah?
Anybody been hiking there?
Few of you. About 500 families
were displaced when that park was formed.
[NOISE] When they were displaced,
they were moved, some of them to resettlement housing.
You can see the houses here in the background and then
a nicely staged photograph of
people doing their garden in the front yard.
A government image intersects
with these earlier media images of
what life was like in the mountains for families.
You can see the plain board housing,
a couple of broken windows,
and the representation of families as
being poor and not able to take care of themselves,
which then created an argument that it was okay to
displace them and put them
in this tract housing that was new,
that had running water and electricity.
In doing a documentary film,
I interviewed some families
who had been displaced, who had been resettled,
not only to the resettlement housing,
but then to The
Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,
which is located in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Forcible sterilization occurred at this hospital.
The argument about one's
housing not being suitable for them to live and
then to be forced to move somewhere else
can have lots of different kinds of consequences.
This piqued my interest at the time
about architectural structures and
what arguments they made,
and architects are also
interested in those issues as well.
Part of what I did at that time,
was look at the ways that people
talked about their own situations in
relationship to those broader media representations
of them as displaceable.
I analyzed some handwritten letters
that were found in
an archive in Shenandoah National Park.
I share Rachel's interest in trying to
understand what people want to say
about their own representations and lived experiences
and how that contrasts
with broader institutional representations.
This picture here on the bottom is of
Mary Francis who was displaced when she was
a girl in the 1930s and
was relocated
to The Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.
Then my work expanded.
I wanted to do a transnational comparison.
Was what I was seeing in
Shenandoah National Park in
Virginia with a very small group of people,
something that was happening
similarly across transnational context?
These images here are some of research in Sri Lanka,
in particular, of people who had been resettled
because of the Civil War there,
but also resettled because of the tsunami in 2004,
and there's also very routinized displacement
due to the monsoon seasons,
and also just economic development.
If you compare them,
this resettlement housing in Virginia,
I don't have an aerial view of that housing.
This is more of an on the ground view.
But most of the resettlement
housing images that we see in
the media are from
what I would argue as a colonialist lens,
looking down on rows and rows of tents,
usually from the UN.
Again, in my earlier work,
this really peaked my interest
from a structural perspective.
What does it mean to only see
displaced populations through the lens
of the rows and rows of tents?
This is Menik Farm in Sri Lanka.
What's interesting about this space is that it was
a refugee camp during the Civil War
when the Tamil communities
were forced to leave their homes.
After the war was over,
the government decided not to give their property back,
and so Menik Farm which had been a refugee camp,
became a permanent town.
These are just a variety of images.
These are ones from Hurricane Katrina on the bottom,
Hurricane Betsy earlier in the '50s.
I started collecting images.
What are the images of displacement
and where people were housed?
Then we have some more recent images from
Southwest Key Programs which build
the detention centers that are in
Texas and Arizona and Florida.
Now, I'm intrigued now by the way that large corporations
profit off of the vulnerability
and precarity of other people.
These images, as you can see,
present a particular dimension of one who is displaced.
I want to take you now to
an architectural innovation by IKEA,
which is really fascinating in terms of IKEA Foundation,
philanthropic arm of the IKEA corporation.
They've built this really
interesting innovative structure
for refugee housing,
where as opposed to a tent,
it can withstand some more extreme weather
and it can be put up and down pretty quickly.
Then the media advertisement for this,
you can donate your money to
help the UN raise funds to them,
buy these structures at cost from IKEA,
intrigues me from a rhetorical perspective.
I did mention before that I'm a rhetorician.
I'm not an architect, I'm a rhetorician,
but I see this image making
the rhetorical argument about who is displaceable,
and making a rhetorical argument
about the kind of housing and the kind of
situation that's okay for one who
needs help in a moment of crisis.
You see here, there's electricity inside the structure.
The family is sitting there watching TV.
There's nice cushions.
They might be from IKEA too, I don't know.
One of the things that interests me about this
is that it's not an aerial view,
colonialist view of rows and rows of tents.
You actually see the bodies of the people
inside and what their life might be like.
That might be a counterargument to that aerial view.
But if you think about it more,
you're getting an argument
about how nice it is inside this structure,
which therefore mask the precarity
that continues to go on
outside and doesn't address
the root causes of displacement on the outside.
I don't know if the architects in the room
might already know about Dezeen magazine.
There's lots of articles in there
about variety of kinds of
architectural innovations that are
changing the lives of refugees in
camps depending on what's being designed.
But mostly, they focus
on making the life in the camp easier.
This one here on the bottom right
is a pop-up kitchen in the City of London.
That's a different kind of argument about
how refugees and migrants might be able to live.
They're living integrated in London,
and here's a pop-up kitchen designed
specifically for an immigrant neighborhood as
opposed to living in a refugee camp away
and outside of other communities.
Like Rachel, I'm really interested in what
people are saying about their displacement experience.
Some of my own interest is in
gathering communities together to talk
about their resettlement experience and how that might
counter the larger institutional
or media representations of displacement.
This little notebook was
filled in by a woman who's
recently resettled in this area,
talking about her home that she used to have in Syria,
the home she has now,
her experience in Jordan as a refugee.
Part of my project is to analyze
and understand those narratives on a larger scale.
What does one person say?
What do 20 people say?
What do 100 people say in relationship to each other?
Then in relationship to what big data
tells us about who is displaced,
where they go when they migrate or when they move.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, lastly, you're going to hear from Georgeta Pourchot.
You won't show any images.
No.
Just going to talk. Georgeta was
born in Communist Romania.
Having witnessed lack of freedom, social injustice,
and government oppression, she developed
a keen desire to study governments and how they work.
In particular, why democratic governments
work better than other types.
She became a founding member of the Romanian Green Party
and run for office in
the first free elections of main 1990.
She was elected to the House of Deputies,
equivalent to our House of Representatives,
where she became involved in legislation to reform
the education system and to
address the environmental crisis.
She had an opportunity to come to the US
to research the democratic process,
authoritarian regimes, and what makes them last,
media freedom, and biases and
security aspects of all types of states.
She came to Virginia Tech where she
has been teaching and developing courses
about the democratization of Eastern Europe and
the aftermath of the Iraq War.
Her current research focus is on Russia and Central Asia,
American foreign policy, and
the international refugee crisis.
She manages an international
refugee partnerships special project
that VT launched in 2017,
created to address pressing issues related to
refugee integration. Thank you.
I was afraid for a second that you were gong
to read the whole thing. It's long.
[LAUGHTER] Thank you once
again for having us here. Thank you, Catherine.
I don't know who pointed it to me,
but it was nice to hear from you.
By now, you would have gotten
an idea that we're talking about images and what
the images are supposed to
suggest in you mind and how you're going to
think about displacement, refugees, migrations, etc.
I'm guessing, if you
were to neglect everything you heard from
these two beautiful scholars
and you state just with the official line,
your impression of displacement
would be positive, raise your hand?
Negative, raise your hand?
There we go. Here's the other one.
We're talking about images from above.
All of this is people in the shadows and we have
gotten to the point where that's how we
think about displaced people,
refugees, illegal aliens.
Aliens, it could be
legal persons or undocumented persons.
Now, they have to be undocumented
aliens to make even worse.
I'm going to switch from images to language.
That's what I'm good at, I talk.
This is the report that we created.
Katie was in fact on the refugee team, she still is.
If any of you is interested in a copy,
I brought a couple of copies.
Given what you too presented so far,
I want to switch a little bit to my current interests.
I sent you something about Europe.
I'm going to something else now
because I would like to look at the positive sides.
All these images do not tell you much
about who these people are,
what they do, what they like, what they eat,
how they spend weekends,
why they're in the situation they're in,
and why should we care?
What's the story here?
Why should we care about all of us?
After a number of
research data within Europe and Central Europe,
Russia, I looked over at them and release them,
and [NOISE] what's happening in Jordan.
Yes, there is a massive flux
of Syrian refugees now after the most recent,
if you follow the news, the most recent
withdrawal of American troops from Turkey even more so.
The Turks now are free to decapitate everything they can.
That's called Kurdish because they've had
this controversy over a piece
of land in northern Turkey for a very long time.
What the media tells us is one thing.
You've seen some of the images.
I could put in front of you,
any number of titles from the last two,
three, four days, two, three, four years.
You'll see that in general,
the narrative being told about
displaced populations is fairly negative.
In recent years, even more
so and not just in this country,
Europe started a little better with
the Syrian refugee [NOISE] crisis in 2015 but by 2017,
the number sorts so much that they just could not handle
it and that's where the politicians do the talking,
they saw their opportunity to recreate the dialogue,
recast, if you will,
the issue of relocation of refugees.
From these people who are displaced,
driven out of their homes by war and us having
a humane responsibility to help where we can.
In a short amount of time if we
continue to absorb them at this rate,
they're going to be a majority.
What do you do when you have that majority?
You're going to have darker skins [NOISE]
in the polls voting.
What are they going to vote for?
From all this political charade,
you ended up with Italy,
Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Greece,
not just central European
countries who are not doing their job anyway,
in terms of taking in refugees,
we're talking about Western Europe
that has been democratic for
quite some time who has dealt with refugees from Austria,
from Russia Communist times when it was
a badge of honor to be a refugee
from the other side of the Arab countries.
All of this is not always heard,
the Danes now are thinking, "Well,
we're going to show them that they're not wanted,
we're going to put them on an uninhabited island."
That was just about six months ago.
Italy's thinking of deporting them also
South and putting them in
an area that nobody wants to live in.
There are just rocks and
deserted land. You can't do anything.
You cannot grow anything
to feed your family, you cannot do anything.
Anyway, enough of this.
I thought there has to be
some positive stories and there are here on Earth.
They do not make the headlines.
You're not going to see them on CNN. Maybe once a year.
That's not nearly enough.
There are refugees who,
despite all these, are struggling to make ends meet.
In places in countries in
which they are allowed to earn a living,
they're allowed to work.
They are building their own businesses.
One family of Syrian in Germany
started from the premise that in
Germany they couldn't find cheese.
It's a specific Syrian cheese made,
there's a specific manufacturing process
to create what they are used to.
So they started making it at home.
Before they know it, they share it to the neighbors,
the neighbors liked it,
[NOISE] the neighbors ordered some.
Then the friends of the neighbors
ordered some and before they knew
they had an offer from the family that was hosting them.
They gave them some capital money to start
their own little factory and that's what they're doing.
They have farm [NOISE]
and they're exporting cheese
even to United States to Syrians here.
There are stories like that everywhere.
They just don't make the news.
The reality is that the only way I
think we can counter the negativity and
all these images that takeover is
to think positive and to look at what's positive.
I'm going to close with one little thing.
Couple of weeks ago I was in Canada talking
about some of the issues in Europe
[NOISE] and it so happened that this was
taking place a few days after the US Open was over.
If you are concerned,
you know that the US Open was won by?
Anybody? Wow, I'm impressed now.
[LAUGHTER] By a Canadian who also happens to be
the daughter of a couple of
Romanians who emigrated to Canada in the early '90s,
just like me when I
came here to the States in the early '90s.
Bianca Andreescu. She beats Serena.
Serena again didn't have her 25th trophy.
This was happening five minutes after she won.
The Prime Minister of Canada
posted on Twitter, Sheila North.
Toronto had the lights on
all night and they celebrated for about a week.
By the time she got to Canada,
the town in which they
relocated named a street after her.
Everybody claims her now,
she's not just from Toronto,
she's from whatever it's called,
a small suburb of Toronto.
This comes two days, three days,
four days after a vitriolic essay
in the papers was written up,
anti-immigration and in particular,
anti-Trudeau who was running again on
the same platform he was welcoming of immigrants.
In fact, there are plenty of immigrants in
Canada. Here you are.
Your country is all of a sudden very
proud due to a recent immigrant.
I'm going to leave it at that.
There are good stories to be told.
We need to see these connections
and we need to be aware of them and it's
very hard to penetrate through
the dominant rhetoric that's coming our way.
These mark the other resource options.
If you are interested in talkings of this nature,
don't just listen to or watch
what you are given immediately.
[NOISE] Look deeper and you're going to find
alternative images like what we have seen today,
alternative stories and you're going to see
that the whole thing is far deeper.
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Now, we're going to open the floor for a conversation.
[NOISE] Things that you may have and also if you have
questions for each other, please feel free.
How about you tripping my water
for your water? [LAUGHTER]
I have a question,
[NOISE] based on your aggressiveness,
but when it comes to housing,
so I was involved in
a project that time
coming from an architectural point of view
on how you can make housing [NOISE] for
disaster relief and you can make it in
a way that is mass-produced [NOISE] to say,
you take us under half an hour
and seven minutes to put it
down but through that process,
it was a lot of research in finding the FEMA trailers were so little used for Hurricane Katrina.
All of these temporary solutions are becoming permanent.
I was wondering for you guys,
would you guys feel you want to talk more that condition
from something that becomes displacement to
something that becomes a permanent placement
and if that affects people in that side.
Yes.
Yeah. I can start with that.
The FEMA trailers in New Orleans are
a really interesting example in
part because of the fact that they were poisoning people.
They were made with
formaldehyde and ended up poisoning people,
so then they sat unused for a long time.
Refugee camps, you may or may not know this that
the Deputy High Commissioner of Refugees is
a Virginia Tech alum and her name is Kelly Clements.
We had an opportunity to
talk to her about some of these issues.
How might we critique something like
the IKEA structure and ostensibly,
the UN for using it, and yet,
also understand the role that
she has and that the UN has in handling
acute situations of disaster relief
and disaster meaning war or natural disaster.
She makes the really strong point
that the UN is meant to handle these acute situations,
the immediacy of the moment.
Being able to design something
innovative like that that can go up quickly,
that can withstand weather,
and that can be deconstructed
quickly and moved to a different site is
really important work and good work.
What's happened is, as you point out,
is that these structures then become permanent.
There are people who have been born and raised for
decades in Kakuma for example,
a refugee camp in Kenya.
Part of my argument is that when we see
representations of the camp, two things happen.
When you see representations of
those camps from the aerial lens,
we're completely disengaged from whoever's inside.
We can't see who it is,
we can't maybe connect with them on a human level.
Then that interior view of
the family being comfortable and watching TV
also serves to distance us
from the reality of the situation.
In fact, it makes it seem like being in
a refugee camp isn't that bad, they're watching TV.
It's always a set of rhetorics that
are operating at not addressing the
root causes of what
the displacement was in the first place.
It's a really complex issue
because we have to be careful not to critique the UN,
it's doing fantastic work.
I think IKEA is too,
and the architects and designers
are doing fantastic work.
But how do we
address the protracted situations that tend to exist?
Then how do we also address issues?
There's one camp,
I can't remember if it's in Jordan but there's
this rows and rows of solar panels which
then provide electricity to a camp.
The kinds of environmental impacts of
those kinds of built structures are
really interesting as well.
How do we manage then,
the acute situation together with what are
the impacts of those protracted situations?
Can I add a word? But I think it seems
that it's important to separate them.
What you said was really important that
the UN deals with the immediacy,
because otherwise there's an expectation that
whoever jumps in will take
care of the whole problem and it's prone to failure.
But if you have, the UN will take care of it,
while then there are other systems in place,
governments, and other institutions that will
help in the incorporation of the refugees into society.
Exactly.
The UN and IKEA and others are
working for that immediate moment,
but then was failing or what's not
working fast enough or not always
successful is the other institutions or
government that should be doing the longer-term work.
That's why that public kitchen and
other innovations like that in terms of
integration into
an already established communities is so key.
A big part of that is having a job,
being allowed to work.
Because at that point,
if you earn enough,
you're going to move out of there no matter what.
You're going to find a better place to live.
Speaking of IKEA, in Sweden,
they created these almost suburbs
of the big cities with these fancy,
well-designed, inexpensive theaters and
that's where they put the refugees.
The reality is even as refugees go
into language training to
learn Swedish and English because
many Syrians do not know English,
they are separate from the rest of society.
If you do not have the human interaction,
if you do not have the job
that permits you to have that human interaction,
you're going to still stay here.
It's going to be another one of those
in your face kind of separation of the two groups.
Of course, they're going to become the other,
we were here before you were and you're the ones who are
making my life miserable and traffic
is harder because of you and etc.
There are all sorts of arguments
made as a result of that.
I think I want to add or
echo on what both of you have said.
Also, just to add to
this that community that is displaced,
that is relegated to a corner of a town and
a corner of a city is a community that can be forgotten,
that can be easily misrepresented,
that can be easily misunderstood.
Integration facilitates what it
means to be a stakeholder.
It facilitates care, it facilitates relationships.
So communities that make space for
refugee populations in their midst are much more likely
to support those individuals
as compared to the circumstances where there is
ostracization is effective segregation
of refugee communities.
That's no good for anybody.
As you said with an aerial community view of what it
pertains to the ability to have
human connection with the people there.
Then where it's like in
the tent setup, those aren't that bad.
Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't
going to take time to watch a film or
documentary where you can understand that connection.
Through image itself, what
is the way through that threshold to be taking that out?
For starters our next policy brief is going to have
a very different photo for
starters because all of a
sudden when I was listening to them I realized,
what have we done? [LAUGHTER] Next time.
It's a really complicated question
and it's a good question I
think that probably one image or a series of
images cannot adequately portray
the complexity of these situations,
and circumstances, and the various forces that
lead to displacement and refugee status.
[NOISE] But narrative combined with image can do a lot.
Whether that is in the context of an essay,
[NOISE] or a news story,
or an interview, or a podcast.
I feel like there's something to be
said for individual narrative,
personal narrative, and community narrative,
and it's narrative that people will
remember even if they can't remember
the specifics of a particular image,
they'll remember a good story.
Are most of the audience members architect students?
I think this is a really interesting question in terms of
design for architects and engineers.
Because a lot of what is talked about in [NOISE] terms of
handling crisis generally is
how do we efficiently handle the problem?
What's the most efficient way the handle it?
Sometimes the most efficient way
isn't the best way for an individual person or
an individual family and I think
the FEMA trailers are a perfect example of that,
because they ended up being toxic.
I know given this program or
the people who are teaching the program that you all
are thinking about issues of
ethical design and innovative design that accounts
for the actual people who might
be using the structures in one way or another.
That's not efficient.
If you're working for a company
that's imposing deadlines and
imposing certain kinds of quotas
and you have to be able to build something quickly.
Then being someone who works in a space like that,
being able to push back on the way that you design,
or the [NOISE] way that you interact with clients,
I think is something that would be
a real strength for you as a participant in that company.
How are you going to design something that then tells
the narrative that's a little bit
different than what we're getting?
Because buildings tell narratives.
I was going to say or at least it's
committed to sensitivity to that narrative.
How are you going to etch
the stories of an individual family into the walls?
But you can think about who your audience is for a space,
who may be being displaced by
the building of that structure, and things like that.
Bringing an ethic of care and
concern to your work is a great way to start.
Another one is to talk to them?
Absolutely.
Just try some of the work that Katie's doing.
It's not that hard and you have
several families relegated in this area.
Yeah.
That's all we need to do, you just
mingle a little bit and listen to them.
I like the point that both Rebecca and
Georgiana said about actually
improving living conditions for
persons who may have been displaced.
We have a stake in that too because it impacts us.
I'm just thinking about a story I've heard
from a Burundi family
who was moved into
an apartment that's the square box apartment,
not a lot of personality and
each room was the exact same size and all
painted white and they hung
really colorful fabrics all over
the room to make it feel more like home.
To me, that was really interesting.
I think those apartment complexes
that are little square boxes
aren't necessarily good for anybody,
whether you've been displaced [NOISE] or not.
Innovative or different kinds of design that account
for different concepts of home is good for all of us.
I want to add to that, I've got another similar story.
Working with Greenlandic communities the past year,
I was told about a similar small boxy apartment
and a large apartment complex in Nuuk Greenland.
Again and again the people who
lived in the apartment complex were removing the doors
from the hinges of the entrance to the apartment.
The building managers who are Danish, by the way,
because Greenland has a very
complicated Danish colonial story.
Building managers were like,
''Why the heck are you guys doing this?
We don't understand, this is ridiculous.''
They kept fining people for removing
the doors and then
finally somebody sat down and talked to them.
It turns out that you can't
wear your traditional very thick,
very large parka and get through the doors of
these very sleek Scandinavian designs.
People were like, ''This is ridiculous,
I'm just going to take the door off.''
[LAUGHTER] If there had been thought or
communication with what the people in
my apartment complex actually needed it would have been
a very different design to that space.
Another example of that.
Now I don't remember what I wanted to
say but I was thinking about
[LAUGHTER] it relates a little bit
to what you were also talking and going back to
the Ikea house because I don't want it to
be seen as it was a bad thing.
If you think of it as the immediacy and
the efficiency of setting
them up quickly for people to live it.
But I remember when there was
an article when they first came out and
reading there and one of
the important aspects of
this house was that it had a door
that could be locked and how that
radically changed the quality of life for refugees.
We'll have immediately left
and whatever condition the possibility
of within that precarious situation
having a sense of private space,
safety for women,
and safety for any belongings that you may have,
but you can actually lock the door.
I was thinking about what you were saying,
the pairing of the image with a narrative.
But if you look at the image alone you can have
multiple readings of it that could all be good
and bad and in between
but accompany it with a narrative you can
understand a little bit more how effective it is with
that narrow bandwidth of big media made.
[LAUGHTER]
I was going to say,
so you guys talking about the perspective of some images
of the structures.
Do you think the shortcoming of this is
that perception by the media
or the perception of the actual structure?
Like having all the different structures
in rows too close together.
What do you think is the actual portrayal
or perspective of the actual structures?
That's a good question.
I've studied stuff like that related
to the environment when I was a student like you,
and how the media was portraying
the environmental crisis at the time.
First, you need to remember that
there's media and there's media.
I'm not going to go to the fake media argument.
But even within the media outlets in this country,
we have a variety of perspectives on the same story.
If you can't find
three different perspectives on one story,
that also comes with images,
dig further and go to Al Jazeera,
somebody who has an English Channel,
go to ITN News.
They will also have something about that story,
and they will have different diligence.
That's where your critical thinking comes in and
that's how you start to figure out,
well, I shouldn't really swallow everything that I'm
given quickly on the headline news.
Now, who's at fault and whose perspective it is?
Some media outlets have a political agenda.
Some do more in depth work,
and they try to give you a bigger story.
We need to remember that it is really very hard to get
into these camps and represent
the stories of the people in
the camps as accurately as you
can for one reason
and one reason alone just to begin with,
is the fact that they're very
traumatized and they no longer
trust the system, whatever system [inaudible].
[NOISE] They are in a tent or in
a building with a narrow door or a larger door,
they no longer trust the system.
Sometimes they will tell me what I want to hear,
but most often than not,
they will not tell you what you would like to know.
That's where it gets really complicated
and discerning, is the
journalist at fault in all this, is there political agenda
behind that or there is a deeper story?
It takes people years to get their trust back.
I think it's embedded historically too.
Part of what interests me,
this got me interested in this part of my research is,
how is it exactly knowing what we
know about the Japanese internment camps in this country,
knowing what we know about the Nazi concentration
and interment camps during World War II,
how is it that we can these detention centers
in Texas and Arizona?
How is that a possibility given our history?
I think it's a really interesting combination
of attitudes and values and
racism and historical narratives about
particular groups of people embedded
in the consciousness of some people in the country.
Then you add that together with
these media images of a detention center,
which looks much like an army base camp.
It's okay for our military personality
that use army base camps.
Why wouldn't it be okay for migrants
crossing the US border to be in these camps?
They're air conditioned. So you can see,
that's the narrative behind that picture.
That's the narrative that often politicians
are counting on being part of
the American consciousness to make it
seem okay or for there not to
be more resistance than there is to something like that.
That's really what I'm interested in.
The question you're asking is
exactly the research question I'm asking is,
is it inherent in the building itself?
Or is it the story that comes along
with a building like that and the story of our country,
the story of the UNHCR in 1950,
the story of the declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
How does all that play into
then this one building
and how that has become acceptable?
There's one question from the web and then they say,
this is really fascinating.
Does anyone want to comment on
the design of the space between the shelters?
The thresholds and zones between
the extreme private of
the Interior and extreme public of the camps?
I will respond to that first by saying that
my work with displaced communities began in East Africa.
I worked in refugee camps in Uganda,
Tanzania, Rwanda, and on the borders of those countries.
Working with communities that we're
dealing with a variety of health issues.
Speak up.
Yeah, of course. As well as working with folks [NOISE]
who were very likely never going to be able to
return to their original communities
or to their home villages.
One thing that I've heard again and
again about the way that the spaces where laid out,
the way that the tents were designed was that,
there was no space for public gathering in a casual way,
and there was no space for privacy
beyond the tiny enclosure of the individual tent.
Furthermore, there was no space for gardening or
for the development of food resources.
The grid-like structure of these camps,
though very efficient for moving bags of
USA donated rice around
and things like that in the wheelbarrows that we used,
was not efficient for the needs of
the community with children that wanted to play,
but it needed to be in the eyesight of parents.
If in the midst of this complicated grid without
spaces for play and
discovery and for people to be human together.
That's one way of thinking about all of this.
Do we have another?
I have a [inaudible] There are some questions;
one in the back, one in the front.
[OVERLAPPING]
Thank you.
Well, but we can linger somewhere out there.
Ask a few questions,
anyway. [inaudible]. [OVERLAPPING] [APPLAUSE]
Thank you.