Spouses And Partners

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.

Join the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies and the Yale Translation Initiative to welcome alumnus Adam Mahler back to Yale for a discussion related to a forthcoming book - a new translation of the 1920 book of poems by Portuguese symbolist poet, Camilo Pessanha, who resided in Macau for the last part of his life (1894-1926). The session will feature a reading of a selection of the original poems in Portuguese with Adam’s new translations. Yale Professor David Jackson wrote the introduction for the book, “Camilo Pessanha in Macau (1894-1926): Symbolism, Orientalism, Exile, Modernity in Clepsydra,” and will provide welcome remarks.
Peter Cole, Horace W. Goldsmith Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies and Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Yale, will moderate the event.

Scholars, writers, and policymakers from Shakespeare to Obama have noted linkages between the physical environment and human behavior toward one another. Professor Burke synthesizes a growing cottage industry of research that seeks to quantitatively measure how changes in climate can affect various types of human conflict. He re-analyzes dozens of individual studies using a common empirical framework and uses Bayesian techniques to study whether – and why – effect sizes differ across settings. Professor Burke finds robust linkages between increasing temperature and multiple types of human violence, including individual level violence (e.g. homicide), organized group violence (e.g. civil war), and self-harm. He then draws implications for a world that continues to warm.
Marshall Burke is associate professor in the Department of Earth System Science and center fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, and research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on measuring and understanding economic livelihoods across the developing world. His work regularly appears in both economics and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Lancet. He holds a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from UC Berkeley, and a BA in international relations from Stanford. He is also co-founder of AtlasAI, a start-up using satellites and machine learning to measure livelihoods.

It is possible to identify gendered disadvantage at almost every point in a migrant woman’s journey, physical and legal, from country of origin to country of destination, from admission to naturalization. Rules which explicitly distribute migration opportunities differently on the grounds of sex/gender, such as prohibitions on certain women’s emigration, may produce such disadvantage. Women may also, however, be disadvantaged by facially gender-neutral rules. Examples of indirectly disadvantageous provisions include those which classify certain forms of labor as either ‘low’ or ‘high skilled’, using this categorization to distribute migration opportunities differentially. Such rules may disproportionately affect the mostly female workers whose labor in certain fields is considered ‘low-skilled’ in comparison to that undertaken by their predominantly male, ‘skilled’ counterparts. Scholars have identified the diverse ways in which states’ immigration and nationality laws continue to involve gendered and racialized exclusion, subordination and violence. Migration control practices, including those concerned with deterrence, detention and deportation, have also been impugned on these bases. The presentation by Dr. Catherine Briddick draws on this literature to examine whether rules that produce gendered disadvantage are open to challenge under the international legal regime charged with eradicating discrimination against women, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Particular attention will be paid to the protection CEDAW offers, or purports to offer, to women seeking international protection.
Catherine Briddick is the Martin James Departmental Lecturer in Gender and International Human Rights and Refugee Law at the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, UK. She is also the Course Director for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies at RSC and the Principal Investigator of Undoing Discriminatory Borders.
Dr. Briddick has over ten years’ experience researching, providing legal advice and engaging in legal advocacy on issues relating to gender, forced migration and human rights in the UK. She has practiced as a barrister, representing individuals before Courts and Tribunals in addition to having managed and delivered legal advice and information services in the not-for-profit sector.
She received her Master of Laws (Legum Magister) in Human Rights Law from the London School of Economics with Distinction. Her doctoral research, undertaken in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, focused on migration status and violence against women to evaluate four selected ‘regimes of exception’. Her work has been published in journals including Social & Legal Studies and the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law. She has also contributed chapters in books like ‘Research Handbook on International Refugee Law’ and ‘The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law’, and written in several platforms including The Conversation and the RSC’s Rethinking Refuge.

Susan E. Brownell
University of Missouri- St. Louis
William Kelly
Yale University
John Horne
Waseda UniversitY