Refugee Hosts at inaugural South-South Forum, Dartmouth College, US

Refugee Hosts’ PI, Prof. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and writer-in-residence, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, will participate in the inaugural South-South Forum, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, which will be held over 3 days from the 13th – 15th of August 2019.

This international and interdisciplinary workshop contributes to the aim of the South-South Forum to bring artists, scholars and activists into direct conversation with each other and to enable interdisciplinary discussions that ‘prioritize theoretical frameworks from the “South”. This is an approach that underpins Refugee Hosts research and our ‘community of conversation’ that invites participants to challenge the dominant humanitarian narrative and offers a critical and creative space to simultaneously document, trace and resist experiences of and responses to forced displacement in and from what is often referred to as the Global South.

Refugee Hosts’ writer-in-residence Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, will present his paper ‘Writing the Camp: Death, Dying and Dialects,’ which draws on and further develops multiple pieces he has written in and about Baddawi Camp, Lebanon as part of the Refugee Hosts project, including Writing the Camp, The Camp is Time and A Sudden Utterance is the Stranger. For a selection of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s poetry please see the recommended list at the end of this piece.

Contributing to the workshop roundtable themed ‘In-Between Spaces and Border Ecologies’, and drawing on recent field work conducted for the Refugee Hosts project in Baddawi Camp, Lebanon, Prof. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will offer reflections on the heterogenous connections that exist between Baddawi and diverse peoples and places across the Global South.

On Monday 12th August Prof. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh will also offer a plenary lecture at Dartmouth College, on past and present forms of Southern-led responses to displacement in and from the Middle East. Her lecture will focus on the Refugee Hosts and the Southern Responses to Displacement projects’ ongoing research in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

More information about the Dartmouth College workshop can be found here.

More information about the Dartmouth South-South Forum can be found here.

You can read a selection of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s poetry below:

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2019) There it is: the camp that is yet to be born

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2019) The Throne

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2018) Necessarily, the Camp is the Border

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2018) Flesh when mutilated called God

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2018) It is a camp despite the name

Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2018) The hands are hers

Qasmiyeh, Y. M (2018) In mourning the refugee, we mourn God’s intention in the absolute

If you have found this piece of interest you can also contribute to our Representations of Displacement Series.

For more information on these and related themes please visit out recommended reading list below: