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This chapter captures the displacement and emplacement of transnational refugee families in scattered locations because of military conflict, (neo)colonialism, immigration regimes, and their refashioned kinship, identity, and belonging. It draws from ethnographic research conducted on resettled Palestinian Iraq War refugees in São Paulo, Brazil, over the span of several years (2009–2014), and most recently in summer 2018, as well as field data collected in Springfield, MA, in January 2018. It focuses on a family originally separated in 2003, contained in various in-between places from 2003 to 2017, and the ways in which they continue their connections while anchoring their lives in disparate locations. Brazil and the United States are the nexus of these exchanges, but these familial geographies encompass the contexts of Lebanon, Syria, and Australia and also reflect and dialogue with family dispersions in Latinx communities.

After crossing the borders of nations, migrants and refugees often encounter racialized and gendered institutional and social boundaries in the places where they seek refuge. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Brazil on displaced Muslim, Palestinian Iraqi War refugees, this article examines the education-migration link in the refugee selection process and formal and informal institutions of education. It considers how these structures produce and reproduce otherness and the dynamic methods refugees utilize to combat and transcend limitations imposed on them. It develops the concept of gendered pedagogies of migrant (dis)integration to analyze the gendered racialization processes that influence belonging.

Transnationalism, The Internet, and the Construction of Identity is a multi-sited ethnography that traces the emergence of Internet Communication Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and in Palestinian communities in the diaspora, namely Lebanon and Jordan. Her study, across 13 sites, is based on three phases of fieldwork conducted from 2001 to 2004 and consists of interviews, participant observation, and data gathered online. Attentive to the social, economic, and political contexts of her research locations, Aouragh provides insight into the heterogeneous experiences of her interlocutors in accessing the virtual world, while also utilizing it as a tool for social activism against a colonial project and to shape and amplify Palestinian national identity. Important to her analysis is debunking the postmodernist assertion that the significance of the nation state has been reduced, as has nationalism, in the age of new technologies and global networks. Aouragh effectively utilizes the Palestinian context to refute these claims. She points to the state-grounded forces responsible for an ongoing dispossession and occupation, but also highlights the loss of Palestinian territory and statelessness in the diaspora as pivotal factors in invigorating the formation and perpetuation of Palestinian national identity offline and online.

In this article, we examine the historical migration of Palestinians to Brazil, while also exploring the resettlement of a group of just over 100 Palestinian refugees in the country. We seek to focus on this group to attend to specificities in the migratory designations of immigrant and refugee and the complex ways these are activated, their gendered-class formation and distinctions, and important nuances in the overarching category “Arab” (or “turco” or “Sírio-Libanês”) in which differences are subsumed and particularities flattened. Neste artigo, examinamos a histórica migração de palestinos para o Brasil e exploramos o reassentamento de um grupo de pouco mais de 100 refugiados palestinos no país. Focamos nestes grupos com o intuito de entender as especificidades das designações migratórias de imigrantes e refugiados e o modo como são acionadas; suas formações e distinções de classe e gênero; e as nuances existentes na abrangente categoria “árabe” (“turco” ou “sírio-libanês”), a partir da qual as diferenças e particularidades dos grupos não são consideradas.