How Do Refugees Challenge the Nation State?

Date: 

Thursday, April 25, 2019, 6:00pm

Location: 

Sever Hall 113

 How Do Refugees Challenge the Nation State? RSVP to the Facebook event HERE. Blackbird Donuts will be served. 

 In the face of widespread closed border and refugee deterrence policies, how do refugees challenge the nation state? The work of imprisoned Iranian-Kurdish writer Behrouz Boochani offers an urgent case study for how refugees can contest their legal and social exclusion. 

As an activist, novelist and journalist, Boochani has exposed the hidden abuse facing refugees detained by the Australian government on the remote Manus Island detention center, while being a detainee there himself since 2013. Boochani will be joining us via video link from Manus Prison to discuss his political resistance and his recently released novel. 

His novel, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador), won Australia’s largest literary prize in January 2019. The book was texted out of Manus Prison via a series of WhatsApp messages sent on a mobile phone over the course of five years. 

Boochani writes frequently in the New York Times, the Guardian and other international newspapers, is the co-director of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, co-produced a play, Manus, is an honorary member of PEN International and has won numerous awards for his writing, including the Anna Politjovskaya Prize for Press Freedom and the 2017 Amnesty Media Award. 

He will be joined in conversation by Professor Mariano Siskind, who works on theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, and Professor Anne McNevin, who focuses on transformations of citizenship in world politics. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard Committee on Australian Studies, the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration and Rights, and the Harvard College Human Rights Review. 

Join us at 6pm Thursday April 25th in Sever 113. 

refugees