Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (Hardcover)
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.
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.
"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
— 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