An archive of political dissent, participation, and future building among migrant communities around the world

“Beyond Refuge: Migrants Reimagining the Political” is a living and breathing archive that mobilizes the power of writing, multimedia, and creative expression in order to spotlight migrant-led social movements and collectives that reimagine what political dissent, participation, justice, equity, and future building look like.

The aim of this archive is to use art, writing, and multimedia to move beyond the narrative that migrants are simply seeking safety and refuge from harrowing circumstances. In this way, “Beyond Refuge” seeks to disrupt hegemonic narratives of migrants as passive victims who simply seek protection, when the reality is that migrants are agentive, capacious, and thoughtful humans who meaningfully shape, reimagine, and strengthen communities everyday. In doing so, this archive does not seek to replace the hegemonic narrative of victimhood with an equally problematic one--that of the resilient immigrant or refugee. Rather, we seek to highlight the ways in which migrants, while they are at the forefront of many important political reimaginings, are also complicated human beings who experience pain, joy, grief, and hope, and everything in between.

Collecting these stories in one space is a way to resuscitate voices, stories, and subjectivities that tend to get marginalized from the academic canon both in higher and secondary education. In that sense, this website is available to all, but may be of particular interest to undergraduate students and educators. We hope this forum can act as the starting point for a larger archive that continues to foreground how migrant lived experience becomes the starting point for dissent and new political and social imaginaries.

Current Content

This archive initially began through the work of students who took the course “Migrant Women’s Political Activism: Global Perspectives” at the University of Virginia’s Global Studies Program in the Spring of 2021, led by Dr. Helena Zeweri. It will continue to feature the work of future generations of students. Their creative projects examine how migrant women’s lives, histories, and current realities take form across space and time in multiple contexts across the world. 

The website also features a limited podcast series called “Beyond Refuge: Afghan Refugee Rights Activism & Advocacy in Australia,” which features the perspectives of the Afghan Australian diaspora around the lived realities of and misconceptions around refuge. The podcast seeks to highlight stories of belonging, community-building, resistance, and advocacy in the wake of Australia’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies. This limited series has been funded by the Australian Anthropological Society through an Engaged Anthropology grant.