Research and Community Partnerships
For years, a number of Virginia Tech faculty members and students have been involved in research projects focused on the experiences of refugees, migrants, and displaced people. This work has been supported by a Virginia Tech Policy Strategic Growth Area planning grant; the Virginia Tech Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention; the Virginia Tech Institute for Culture, Society, and the Environment; and the Voice of Witness Foundation.
Through “Resettlement Stories: Place, Identity, and Narrative as Evidence-based Data for Policy Change,” the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies explores integration experiences for refugees, migrants, and communities. Center members also work in partnership with the nonprofit Voice of Witness on “Resettled: Narratives of Beginning (Again) in Appalachia,” an oral history project that highlights stories of displacement and resettlement in the Appalachian region.
RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES
The Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies supports graduate student and faculty research through small grants. Contact Katrina Powell, director of the center, for more information.
RESEARCH PROJECTS
Elimisha Kakuma - Virginia Tech Research Group
We frequently partner with communities to conduct research, including this partnership between Virginia Tech students and Elimisha Kakuma students. Click on the link to learn more about barriers to education in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
The Critical Carceral Studies Lab
Though seemingly ubiquitous with the organization of human societies, prisons and large jails are a very recent invention in the grand scale of human history – barely 200 years old. Not only do prisons now seem to be a “natural” disciplinary institution for large societies, “innovations” in penology have not only marketized incarceration but have also expanded the categories of criminalization to increase overall occupancy. Over the past five decades, with the growing realization that incarceration is but one of many technologies of discipline birthed from the colonial imagination of the late 18th and 19th centuries, scholars critical of mass incarceration have gradually shifted the dialogue from prison reform to carceral abolition.
The Critical Carceral Studies Lab is an abolitionist endeavor. Its goal is to create a space for academics, activists, community advocacy organizations and the formerly incarcerated to reimagine society without prisons, jails, and police, and to collaborate on projects that help bring others into this imaginative space and make the goal of carceral abolition closer in reach. How can we re-think and re-pattern society such that carcerality becomes unthinkable?
Members of the Critical Carceral Studies Lab will collaborate in theorizing, producing and filming an oral history project that documents life in select rural “prison communities.” The film project critically examines rural American efforts to rebuild itself through the expansion of incarceration and the compromises, tensions, and sacrifices that this pursuit engenders. It contrasts how the freedom for some to pursue life, liberty, and happiness is socially and materially dependent on the punishment of and privation of liberty for others. The film will explore these tensions by documenting the narratives and stories of rural residents in towns with large prisons and whose economic destinies have been tied, therefore, to the expansion of mass incarceration. In doing so, it aims to reflect the resilience, determination, and resignation of the rural poor, often migrants, who must continually fight for belonging and a right to live without threat of punishment or displacement, juxtaposed against the predicament of the dehumanized urban poor, and increasingly undocumented migrants, who make up the majority of persons incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons.
As a community of activist scholars, the Critical Carceral Studies Lab considers research, teaching, and activism as mutually informing and intersecting activities. To that end, the Lab seeks to align our knowledge production with grassroots social movements. The Critical Carceral Studies Lab is led by a joint effort between Dr. Rebecca Hester, associate director for the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies, and professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech; filmmaker and scholar Dr. Yehuda Sharim of the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California Mercer; and Dr. Jason Glenn, professor of History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
Funded by the Center for Rural Education at VT, Co-PI's Claire Cahen and Rebecca Hester
Schools in poor, rural communities have been known to tether themselves to the prison economy, lobbying forcefully to bring prisons in to boost jobs and revenue, and attract residents to populate otherwise shrinking school districts. Schools in rural prison towns also typically launch job-training programs to prepare students to work in local correctional facilities. But what happens when prison promises of economic growth do not materialize? Using participatory action research methods, we propose to investigate this question in Lawrenceville, VA, where the local population is campaigning to oust a prison that it once courted. We ask how the local schools oriented their curriculum and activities to the prison over the last two decades, and whether the recent controversy over the correctional facility has altered the orientation of students, teachers, and district leaders toward the prison economy. Our goal is three-fold: 1) to fill a gap in knowledge on how rural education interfaces with the prison economy; 2) to use participatory action research to give the town a chance to “speak back” to policies that tether education to the carceral complex; 3) to outline policy recommendations to protect the well-being and stability of rural schools in prison towns.
Funded by the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention at VT, Co-PI's Rebecca Hester and Claire Cahen
A relatively understudied form of “forced migration,” incarceration removes people from their families and communities, leaving them with little control over where they end up and what they experience, and their families and friends with little means to support and care for them. Similar to other forcibly displaced populations, prisoners in state custody are subject to involuntary movement, often under threat to their lives and livelihoods. Far from an unfortunate outcome of an overburdened system, this form of displacement is by design. In this project, students and faculty affiliated with the Critical Carceral Studies Lab (CCSL), an initiative of the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech, work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals to describe their experiences of forced migration within the U.S. prison system. The project’s contribution to peace building and violence prevention rests, first, in humanizing individuals who have been incarcerated by helping them tell, record, and edit their own stories. Second, its intervention rests in exposing an undertheorized violence of mass incarceration: forced displacement. Our overarching goal is to use humanities methodologies to teach, imagine, and advocate for a more peaceful, just, connected, and empathetic world.
Resettlement Stories: Place, Identity, and Narrative as Evidence-Based Data for Policy Change
Refugee and migrant integration is traditionally analyzed through legal rights, self-sufficiency, and belonging using large, urban-area datasets. These approaches neither identify the complexities of refugee integration nor capture nuanced community challenges.
“Resettlement Stories: Place, Identity, and Narrative as Evidence-Based Data for Policy Change” studies integration experiences for refugees, migrants, and communities through what its leaders call “integration network analysis.” This novel method uses long-form oral history interview data from resettled families, volunteers, and service programs and complements the data with semantic network analysis to extract central concepts and themes. This approach can yield comparative analysis accounting for perspectives of the resettled, perspectives not captured in existing datasets, providing evidence-based recommendations for policy makers.
This research supports the International Refugee Research Project, an interdisciplinary, international collaboration among Virginia Tech, Bundeswehr University, and the University of Kent with the goal of informing refugee policy.
Funding for this project is provided by a Virginia Tech Policy Strategic Growth Area planning grant; the Virginia Tech Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention; the Virginia Tech Institute for Culture, Society, and the Environment; and the nonprofit Voice of Witness.
Katrina M. Powell, Katherine Randall, and Rebecca Hester. “Refugee and Migrant Partnerships in Virginia: Fostering Connectivity and Reciprocity.” Vibrant Virginia: Engaging the Commonwealth to Expand Economic Vitality, ed. by Margaret Cowell and Sarah Lyon-Hill, Virginia Tech Publishing. Forthcoming.
Randall, Katherine, Katrina M. Powell, and Brett Shadle. “Resisting the Trauma Story: Ethical Concerns in the Oral History Archive.” Displaced Voices: A Journal of Archives, Migration and Cultural Heritage 1.2 (2020): 76-79.
Powell, Katrina M. and Katherine Randall. “Community Workshops and Rhetorics of Home in the Stories of Persons Seeking Refuge.” albeit: Journal of teaching and scholarship 5.1 (2018). Web.
Shadle, Brett L. “The ‘Problem’ of the Urban Refugee: The African Refugee Regime and the Joint Refugee Services of Kenya (1967-1982),” forthcoming in Canadian Journal of African Studies.
Shadle, Brett L. “Reluctant humanitarians: British policy toward refugees in Kenya during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1940,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 47 (2019): 167-86.
Shadle, Brett L. “Refugees and Migration in African History,” in William Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe, eds., A Companion to African History (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).
Shadle, Brett L. “‘As if I were in Prison’: White Deportation and Exile from Early Colonial Kenya,” in Benjamin Lawrance and Nathan Carpenter, eds., Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
Hester, R.J. (2014) Bodies in Translation: Public Health Promotion in Indigenous Mexican Migrant Communities in California, In: Alvarez, S., de Lima Costa, C., Feliú, F., Klahn, N., Hester, R.J., and Thayer, M. with Cruz C. Bueno, editors, Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Hester, R.J. (2015) Cultural Competency Training and Indigenous Cultural Politics in California, Latino Studies Vol. 13, No.3, pp.316-338.
Hester, R. J. (2012, December). The Promise and Paradox of Cultural Competence. In HEC Forum (Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 279-291).
Hester, R.J. (2016) Culture in Medicine: An Argument against Competence. Critical Medical Humanities Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hester, R.J., Jason E. Glenn, Erica Hua Fletcher, Brenda Wilson, Shannon Guillot-Wright (Hear Our Voice Collective), “Hear Our Voice: Studies of Struggles and Survival in Galveston.” Documentary Film.
Hester, R.J. “We are not better off” Commentary, Roanoke Times, November 21, 2018.
Hester, R.J. “Response to a Case Study, a Difficult Birth: Navigating Language and Cultural Differences. Internet publication, June 2008.
Pourchot, Georgeta. “The Global Compact on Migration: What Is and Is Not Working, The Case of Europe.” Global Compact on Migration: Is It Possible? Conference organized by Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, October 2019.
Cutler, Dawn and Georgeta Pourchot. “Refugee Integration in New EU Member States.” International Metropolis Conference, Ottawa, Canada, June 2019.
Pourchot, Georgeta. “Evidence for Smart Policy: International Refugee Research Project.” University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants formal launch, July 2018, Rutgers University
Powell, Katrina M. and Katherine Randall. “Persons Seeking Refuge, Community Workshops, and Rhetorics of Place.” Rhetoric Society of America, Atlanta, GA, June 2018.
Powell, Katrina M. “Displacement.” Margins Conference Keynote Speaker, Clemson University, March 2018.
Powell, Katrina M. Khaled Hassouna, Katherine Randall. “Tools of Integration: A Case Study of the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership.” International Refugee Research Conference, Tutzing, Germany, March 2018.
Cutler, Dawn and Georgeta Pourchot. “Refugee Integration in New EU Member States.” International Refugee Research Project Conference, Tutsing, Germany, March 2018.
Panel: “Living Our Rhetoric: How Research Centers Can Bridge the Academic and Public Work of Rhetoric.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. Kansas City, MO, March 2018. Powell, Katrina M., “The labor of the public turn: research, engagement, and (the ethics of) transforming communities.” Katherine Randall, “Languaging at the Public Table: The Responsibility of Rhetoric Centers in Supporting Community Work.” Alexis Priestley, “Doing Rhetoric: Cultivating and Networking an Octologian Space.” Carolyn Commer, “An Octalogic Pedagogy for Graduate Education in Rhetoric & Composition.”
Powell, Katrina M. “Tent Cities, Resettlement Housing, & Rhetorical Constructions of Home in Narratives of Displacement.” Temple Univ. Humanities Center Invited Speaker, February 2018.
Powell, Katrina M. Khaled Hassouna, Brett Shadle, Jon Catherwood-Ginn, Laura McCarter, Katherine Randall, and Jane Wemhoener. “Refugee Integration.” International Refugee Research, Arlington Research Center, October 2017.
Powell, Katrina M. “Identity and Displacement.” Roanoke College Refugee Panel, October 2017.
Cutler, Dawn and Georgeta Pourchot. “Refugee Integration in New EU Member States.” International Refugee Research Project workshop, Virginia Tech Research Center, October 2017.
Resettled: Narratives of Beginning (Again) in Appalachia
An oral history project in partnership with Voice of Witness, Resettled: Narratives of Beginning (Again) in Appalachia highlights stories of displacement and resettlement in the Appalachian region. This project aims to offer a counternarrative to the stereotypes about Appalachia as a homogenous place, while also exploring the unique place-based experience of resettlement in the area. Resettled will be published as an edited collection in the Voice of Witness series.
Funding for this project is provided by the Voice of Witness Foundation.
Powell, Katrina M. ed. Resettled: Narratives of Beginning (Again) in Appalachia. New York: Haymarket Books, forthcoming 2022.