“According to UNHCR, the number of forcibly displaced people both within countries and across borders as a result of persecution, conflict, or generalized violence has grown by over 50 per cent in the last 10 years; there were 43.3 million forcibly displaced people in 2009, and the figure was 70.8 million by the end of 2018 (UNHCR, 2019). Today 1 out of every 108 people in the world is displaced.” (Source)
Friends, I have good news. In the 2020-21 academic year, I will serve as a co-coordinator for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Rackham Graduate School Interdisciplinary Workshop on Migration and Displacement. My journey towards migration research entails a longwinded and winding narration of mistakes, backtracks, and personal reflection.
As my research moved from examining the social and cultural forms of religious and anti-religious expression in nineteenth-century France and among French intellectuals to the in-and-out migration of Central Asians to Paris from the late nineteenth-century to the Postwar era, I became more aware of the pressing need of scholarly engagement with questions of asylum, policy, race and radicalization, and the politics of displacement and population movement across Europe.
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