What is Home? Syrian Refugees and the Search for Belonging
Pulling upon interviews with nearly 500 displaced Syrians around on five continents, this talk by Prof. Wendy Pearlman explores personal stories of losing, seeking, finding, or not finding home, and what they teach us about the meaning of belonging
What is home? While of universal significance, this question gains special meaning in contexts of forced migration. Syria is an especially illustrative case, as it is the single largest source of the unprecedented 80 million people displaced around the world today. In this presentation, Wendy Pearlman shares excerpts from interviews that she has conducted with nearly 500 Syrian refugees around the world over the course of the past decade. She explores their varied stories of losing home, seeking home, finding home, not finding home, or rethinking the meaning of home, and discusses what their experiences can teach us about the human search of belonging.
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. 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 Books.