Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities
- Submitting institution
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The University of Leeds
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- UOA27-1123
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- ISBN
- 9781474443197
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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4
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Refugee Imaginaries is a collection of thirty-two chapters that argues the study of the refugee should be at the centre of contemporary critical study. At thirty-two chapters and 500pp, it is the outcome of a decade of collaboration both between the editors and between the editors and refugees. Durrant’s engagement with refugees began in 2010, with the establishing of a new model of bibliotherapy for refugees and asylum seekers, in partnership with local NGOs. The work of his co-editors and other contributors is similarly informed by collaborative research with refugees in multiple national and international contexts.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Refugee Imaginaries is the first major volume of arts and humanities research in the field of Refugee Studies. Durrant and Stonebridge started discussions with EUP in 2013, an editorial team was then assembled and the design of the volume conceived, with one part on the genealogy of the refugee, and eight parts on the different geopolitical spaces associated with the refugee. 32 contributors were commissioned to write the different chapters. Durrant was responsible for: the volume title, Refugee Imaginaries, defined both as the way refugees are imagined by others and the ways in which refugees imagine themselves; co-writing the introduction with the other editors (5000 words); commissioning, curating and writing introductions to two of the nine parts of the volume (2x1000words); editing drafts chapters across the volume; liasing extensively with EUP; writing the final chapter of the volume (11,000 words). The research process involved shaping a new field of enquiry, deciding on the major figures to be approached, and deciding how best to plot the different dimensions of the field, ultimately reflected in the twin geneaological / spatial design. The volume is centrally concerned with the role of the arts in shaping refugee imaginaries, counteracting hostile media depictions and offering ‘thick descriptions’ of refugee experience and the conditions that generate statelessness. Moving beyond the opposition of hostile media and sympathetic artistic production, it highlights the importance of the critical turn in the humanities, in which aesthetic engagement with refugee life itself becomes the object of critique. Durrant’s chapter exemplifies this critical turn. Rather than reproducing the refugee as the object of First World concern, he argues that the proper role of cosmopolitan aesthetics is to effect an auto-critical exposure of cosmopolitanism’s own implication in the global structures of oppression and exclusion that produce statelessness.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
