*The seminar will be held in English.
Meeting room limits up to 50 attendees.
【About the Talk】
In 2015, the news was filled with reports on dehydrated, starving, and tortured Rohingya abandoned in the Andaman Sea and in jungle camps along the Thai-Malaysia border. They had fled persecution in Arakan, Myanmar and precarity in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. It was the first time that news surrounding Rohingya’s flight across the Bay of Bengal region led to international headlines. But the violence in their homeland and their escape from it across the region had been sweltering and growing for decades. It had developed into a profitable and exploitative business. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya in Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal, I reconstruct Rohingya’s experiences of their exilic wanderings through their own narratives. Rohingya’s narratives are often fragmented and dispersed across a wide terrain and span years. Piecing them together through this book project, I learn to understand Rohingya journeys as a familial and communal ‘travail’ emblematic to the life of refugees and forced migrants in Asia in the late 20th and early 21st century. The term ‘travail’ denotes a mode of travel that involves hardship and work. It does not signify a mode of travel that is defined by pleasure, status, or adventure. In contrast, the term captures how Rohingya are repeatedly forced to flee due to persecution and deportation and at the same time, they are arrested in movement by encampment and detention; Rohingya have to precariously work and find themselves bonded by debt to finance their family’s survival; they tirelessly seek, work, and wait for a better life. Yet, most remain unable to escape the trauma of their ongoing genocide as the interests of competing refugee regimes and a restrictive and profit-driven migration industry do not allow them to arrive in a safe haven.
【Note】
- The organizer reserves the right to amend the program and to limit or refuse entry to any person at any times, and will preclude those who are absent twice without notice.
- A confirmation email will be sent to you after the registration is closed.
- To prevent waste from the disposal of single-use cups, kindly bring your own water bottles or mugs.
