Place, Displacement and Belonging: The Story of Abdi

Political geography III: International migration and geopolitics

“…These discursive tricks translate migrant vulnerability into a domestic threat against the safety and security of host-country citizens and represent migrants’ economic desperation as low-wage job theft. In response, some scholars suggest the incorporation of narrative and storytelling as a method for countering these false representations and reclaiming the agency of migrants, and “the dyadic connection between place and self” to highlight the embodied experiences of individuals (Myadar, 2022: 474). Additionally, Bloch (2022) argues that displacement creates a type of data that is embodied where the indiscriminate temporalities of migratory processes are stored through memory.…”

The power of story: Understanding gendered dimensions of mobility among Tucson refugees

“…But we do so by recognizing the limitations the refugee categorization has under the current international refugee regime (Scherschel K., 2014). The term ‘refugee’ excludes millions of displaced individuals who had to flee other life‐threatening conditions, natural disasters (Myadar, 2020; Myadar & Dempsey, 2022). “At the heart of the process of making and unmaking refugees is therefore the politics of labeling and categorization that institutionalize the global refugee regime and social capacities the labeling dictates in return” (Myadar & Dempsey, 2022, p. 368).…”

“…It also creates a “single story” of refugees‐one defined by the story of subjecthood and victimhood (Adichie, 2009). This also creates ‘the refugee figure’—“a figure that has no agency and is identical in his/her experiences to other refugees” (Myadar, 2020, p. 463). As Malkki argues, the idea of refugee “has analytical usefulness not as a label for a special generalizable kind or type of person or situation, but only has a broad legal or descriptive rubric that includes within it a world of different socioeconomic statuses, personal histories, and psychological or spiritual situations.” (1995:496).…”

“…This number is the highest recorded in any single year and still growing. However, as alarming as such statistics may be, when they are expressed in disembodied terms, the human dimension of widespread displacement is not adequately captured, and the uniqueness of each individual's journey is lost beyond the veil of numbers (Myadar, 2020; Myadar & Dempsey, 2022).…”