Writers for Democratic Action presents...

Seeking Sanctuary: Refugees, Migrants, Immigrants and the Protection of Human Rights

In this Democracy Book Club conversation, Sophia Balakian, anthropologist and author of Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest, professor and author of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands, will consider issues such as refugee resettlement, immigrant child advocacy, deportation, and the policing of national borders in response to the ongoing struggles of individuals and families displaced by persecution, war, civil strife, political and economic policies, and more.

Sophia Balakian is a sociocultural anthropologist and scholar of forced migration, and Assistant Professor in the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University. She is the author of Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, which was released this past February from Stanford University Press. The book examines the post-9/11 securitization of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and the ways in which people from Somalia and DR Congo navigate bureaucratic systems and security technologies that structure humanitarian programs. From 2019-2020, and 2022-2023, Balakian was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She has published in such journals as American Ethnologist, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Anthropologica, and African Studies Review, and in the edited volume, Global Perspectives on the United States.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, originally from the Texas/Mexico borderlands, is Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the author of four books—Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana; Mexican Enough; All the Agents and Saints; and Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life. She has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, VQR, The Believer, BBC, Orion, and Oxford American. Her work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation, Princeton University, and the Institute for Arts and Humanities, among others, and she is recipient of a Margolis Award, an International Latino Book Award, a PEN Southwest Book Award, and two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism prizes. Griest has performed in capacities ranging from a Moth storyteller to a literary ambassador for the U.S. State Department, and her work has led her to 50 countries and 49 states. She recently endowed “Testimonios Fronterizos” a research grant for student journalists from the borderlands enrolled at her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism.

Robin Davidson is a poet, translator, and Professor Emerita for the University of Houston Downtown. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship in Poland and an NEA fellowship, she has authored two poem chapbooks and two poetry collections, most recently, Mrs. Schmetterling (Arrowsmith Press, 2021). With Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, she has co-translated two volumes of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish—The New Century and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, 2021). From 2015 to 2017 she served as Poet Laureate for the city of Houston and edited Houston’s Favorite Poems, an anthology of Houstonians’ beloved poems featuring the work of 119 poets from across the globe. She serves on the National Steering Committee for Writers for Democratic Action and as chair of WDA’s Texas Chapter.

Frances de Pontes Peebles of The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights

Frances de Pontes Peebles is a novelist, a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction, and chair of the Board of Directors for The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. She has authored two novels, The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe, both of which have been translated widely. The Seamstress has been published in ten languages and won the Elle Grand Prix for fiction, the Friends of American Writers Award, and the James Michener–Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. It was adapted for film in 2017 by Conspiração Filmes and for a television miniseries which aired to record-setting ratings on Brazil’s Rede Globo network in January 2018. Born in Pernambuco, Brazil and raised in Miami, Florida, Peebles is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she now teaches as an Associate Visiting Professor.

Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship by Sophia Balakian

Against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to classify most displaced families—more than 99% globally—as ineligible for resettlement, and often as fraudulent. But “fraud” as a category is not as self-evident as it may first appear. Nor is “the family.” Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of “fraud” and “family” from different vantage points in this context, Balakian shows how the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. Such practices allow them to fulfill obligations to kin—kin defined expansively, in ways that at times exceed the boundaries of normative, US frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates “the family” as a crucial category in processes of producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states in the 21st century.

All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Upon her return after a decade away, Stephanie Elizondo Griest finds that her ancestral home in the Texas/Mexico borderlands—ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall—has become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom have perished along the way. As she begins to meet Mohawks of the Akwesasne Nation, she recognizes striking parallels between their experience and life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. This work of creative nonfiction weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between and the people who live there.

Writers for Democratic Action presents "Seeking Sanctuary: Refugees, Migrants, Immigrants and the Protection of Human Rights"