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University of California Press

Departures

An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies
by Yen Le Espiritu (Author), Lan Duong (Author), Ma Vang (Author), Victor Bascara (Author), Khatharya Um (Author), Lila Sharif (Author), Nigel Hatton (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $24.95 / £21.00
Publication Date: Oct 2022
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 202
ISBN: 9780520386396
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.25
Illustrations: 5 illustrations
Series:
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About the Book

Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, artists, and academic institutions and forge new and humane reciprocal paradigms, dialogues, visuals, and technologies that replace and reverse the dehumanization of refugees that occurs within imperialist gazes and frames, sensational stories, savior narratives, big data, colorful mapping, and spectator scholarship. This resource and guide is for all readers invested in addressing the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production, and global imaginings of refugees.

About the Author

The Critical Refugee Studies Collective is a group of interdisciplinary scholars who advocate for and envision a world where refugee rights are human rights. Committed to community-engaged scholarship, the Collective charts and builds the field of critical refugee studies by centering refugee lives—and the creative and critical potentiality that such lives offer. In addition to studying refugees, many Collective members are themselves refugees with long and deep ties to refugee communities in California and beyond.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue: A Letter to Our Communities 

Introduction: Departures
1. A Refugee Critique of the Law: On "Fear and Persecution"
2. A Refugee Critique of Fear: On Livability and Durability
3. A Refugee Critique of Humanitarianism: On Ungratefulness and Refusal
4. A Refugee Critique of Representations: On Criticality and Creativity
Conclusion: In/Verse

Epilogue: A Letter to UNHCR 
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Departures works best as a critical manifesto ‘by and for refugees.’ Bold and provocative, it will not fail to spark conversations in the coming years."
— Review of International American Studies
"Departures illuminates us in a brave and stimulating way on many layers and levels. The authors of this influential book succeed in eloquently articulating how to dishonour and dismantle not only dated methodologies to understand refugee issues but also the treatment of refugees."
— Ethnic and Racial Studies
"This compact book performs two significant functions for the field of critical refugee studies: it provides a name for a growing body of critical analyses of the forced displacement of people by conflicts, their experiences of forced migration, and the history and discourse of the humanitarian sector, and it claims a refugee-centered and critical feminist place in the scholarly literature. . . . Recommended."
— CHOICE
"Departures represents both an excellent introduction to Critical Refugee studies and something like a refugee manifesto. It is an unabashed polemic against the dehumanization of refugees and a forceful demonstration of the unlimited value and contributions of refugees themselves in terms of—but not limited to—knowledge and cultural production, world views, narratives, and more."
— American Literary History
"This book makes a compelling case for the need for new methods in attending to refugees, one of the most important subjects of our time. By centering refugees, the book offers an innovative and much-needed intervention in understanding the contexts, histories, creativity, and lifeworlds of refugees as subjects."—Thy Phu, Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora, and Visual Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough

"In flipping the script and 're-storying' dominant narratives and visualizations, the authors make a compelling case for developing new analytics, new names, and new tools to grapple with refugee conditions, knowledge, and consciousness. This book is sure to be widely read and referenced."—Susan Koshy, Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign