General Public

Drawing on a global and comparative ethnography, this presentation explores how Syrian men and women seeking refuge in a moment of unprecedented global displacement are received by countries of resettlement and asylum—the U.S., Canada, and Germany. It shows that human capital, typically examined as the skills immigrants bring with them that shape their potential, is actually created, transformed, or destroyed by receiving states’ incorporation policies. Since these policies derive from historically informed and unequal approaches to social welfare, refugees’ experiences raise a mirror to how states (re)produce inequality.
Heba Gowayed is the Moorman-Simon Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University.
Her research, which is global and comparative, examines how low-income people traverse social services, immigration laws, and their associated bureaucracies, while grappling with gender and racial inequalities. Her writing has appeared in academic outlets as well as in public outlets including Slate, Al Jazeera English, The New Humanitarian, and Teen Vogue.
Sponsored By: Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses (PRFDHR) and the Yale Center of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM)

The Humanities in Action Series features Yale Environmental Humanities grantees sharing their completed projects, reflecting upon their research and creative processes, and collectively discussing what they have learned about engaging broader publics on environmental and social issues.
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“Humanities in Action: Oral Histories and Artistic Exhibitions” will feature Matthew O’Malley and Aniko Szucs, two grantees whose thematically diverse projects culminated in the development of an oral history archive and a mini-exhibition. The conversation will include a discussion of their projects, which document the 1960s development of the Kensington Expressway in Buffalo New York, and showcase Polish, Slovenian, and Russian artists and activists’ environment advocacy, respectively.
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Yale Environmental Humanities gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the 320 York Humanities Grant Program, the Yale School of the Environment, the Whitney Humanities Center, and The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund.

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is a faculty member at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, where directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy. She is non-resident Senior Fellow and Co-Chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism in the Middle East, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and was non-resident Senior Fellow in National Security and the Middle East, at the Center for American Progress. She is a Co-President of Religions for Peace. Prodromou served as Vice Chair and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2004-2012) and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group (2011-2015).
Her research interests focus on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Southeastern Europe. Her current research projects concentrate on cultural heritage and institutional religious freedom in Turkey and comparative context, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christianity and global public engagement. She is the faculty director for Fletcher’s executive education program for faith-based leadership. The author of multiple edited volumes and many publications in scholarly and policy journals, Prodromou is a frequent commentator and contributor in US and international media.
She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. in political science from MIT, an M.A.L.D. in international relations from Fletcher, and a B.A. in history and international relations from Tufts University.

The victory of the Bolshevik Red Army over its opponents forced thousands of Russians to abandon their homes and pursue their lives in exile. Embarking on a long period of transit, former subjects of the Russian Empire spread across the five continents and established diasporic communities, known as Russia Abroad. This presentation will focus on one of the stops on their journey ––Greece––and will attempt to reconstruct the experiences of Russian émigrés in a country afflicted by its own refugee crisis.
Charis Marantzidou is a PhD student in modern European history and a Richard Hofstadter Fellow at Columbia University. Her research focuses on modern Russia and the Soviet Union with a particular interest in the communities of Russian diaspora in Europe.
Before coming to Columbia, Charis completed a master’s in International History at the London School of Economics. She holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY.
HYBRID EVENT
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What is home? While of universal significance, this question gains special meaning in contexts of forced migration, as the violent dislodging of persons from their established moorings brings to the fore dynamics of home-making that are obscured in more settled circumstances. Syria is a particularly illustrative case due to the staggering speed and scope of the displacement of millions of people, as well as the unparalleled variety of experiences that they are having in nearly every country across the globe. This presentation will introduce Professor Wendy Pearlman current book project, which explores experiences of losing home, searching for home, finding home, or not finding home based on 475 original interviews that she has conducted since 2012 with Syrian refugees, migrants, and asylum-seekers, now residing on five continents. Professor Pearlman argues that Syrians’ life stories reveal how home is the convergence of many elements, including security, fulfillment, place, love, and belonging. When these elements do not straightforwardly merge in a single home, people must bring home into being however they can. They might create elements anew, make do with some elements but not others, or come to a new understanding of what matters to them most. Doing so requires perseverance through adversity in order to grow an awareness of whom one really is and what gives one a sense of being anchored in the world. For those who do not have the privilege of taking home for granted, therefore, home is an achievement. Seeing home in this light exposes the hollowness of discourse that either accuses migrants and refugees of living easy on social benefits or that tokenizes the successes of migrant doctors, entrepreneurs, or star pupils who defy the odds to earn social accolades. Instead, it considers how simply arriving at the point where one feels at home is itself a feat worthy of recognition. To be cast out into the world and search for home anew is an act of courage. To find home is a gift worth celebrating. To persevere without it is a reflection of strength worthy of recognition and respect.
Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she holds the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence and specializes in Middle East politics. Her research has focused on comparative politics, social movements, political violence, refugees and migration, emotions and mobilization, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is the author of four books: Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada (Nation Books, 2003), Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Triadic Coercion: Israel’s Targeting of States that Host Nonstate Actors (with Boaz Atzili, Columbia University Press, 2018) and We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017). Her new book about Syrian narratives of homes is under contract with Liveright.