Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

As a refugee scholar, I have long observed the ways in which refugee experience and identity have been subsumed under the categories of international, immigrant, and transnational. In academia, and beyond, there is very little attention paid to the important distinction in the experiences between those who can go home and those who cannot. The dialectic tension between refuge and home is especially important as more and more of the world’s population is becoming displaced due to war, poverty, and climate change. Those displacements are always the results of violence, be it colonialist, racist, or capitalist. Therefore, to become a refugee is to learn intimately the precarity of one’s existence and the material effects of displacement. Seeking refuge is an exercise of constant negotiations between how of much of yourself to abandon to be granted “home.” At the same time, the concept of refuge allows us to consider how, even within the United States, increasingly more people are displaced due to politics of racism, transphobia, health inequities, and poverty. As CCCS enters its second decade, it is essential to theorize refuge – together with displacement, home, and sanctuary – to further intersectional and interdisciplinary critical cultural inquiry into issues of power, identity, and bodies.

The issue will be inclusive of different theorizations and modalities of refuge, while still centering refugee experience. The journal issue will consist of full-length articles that theorize refuge from a diversity of perspectives and actively engage with dialectical tensions between refuge and home; displacement and belonging; colonialism and resistance; sanctuary and violence. Successful submissions will go beyond the polemic to provide a detailed theorization and analysis of refuge and its related forms.

• Autoethnographies of refugee experiences

• Media representation of refugees

• Theorization of “home” and seeking “home”

• Political, social and economic constructions and critiques of sanctuaries

• Border violence and refugee experiences

• The categorization of bodies as sanctuary-worthy

• Theorizing refugee vs. migrant populations

• Imperial and colonial violence and resistive refugee experience

• Refuge and Border Rhetorics

• Indigenous experiences of home and refuge

• Trans bodies and seeking refuge from anti-trans policies

• Climate change and climate refugees

• Material effects of refuge on bodies and identities

• Histories of refugee experiences

• Black bodies and seeking refuge from Anti-Blackness

• Border rhetorics and the politics of refuge

• Surveillance of refugee bodies

• Engagement with current imperialist and colonial violence that centers refugee bodies and identities (e.g. Russian invasion of Ukraine; Israel-Hamas war and the subsequent Palestinian refugee crisis; bombings and other acts of violence against refugee camps; current global displacements of refugees, etc).