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The digital age throws questions of representation, participation, and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms, and big data centers take over the process of mapping the subjugated and subaltern. Mapping Crisis questions whether it is the map itself that is in crisis. This book brings together critical perspectives on the role that mapping people, knowledges, and data now plays in humanitarian work, both in cartographic terms and through data visualizations. Since the rise of Google Earth in 2005, there has been an explosion in the use of mapping tools to quantify and assess the needs of the poor, including those affected by climate change and the wider neo-liberal agenda. Yet, while there has been a huge upsurge in the data produced around these issues, the representation of people remains questionable. Some have argued that representation has diminished as people are increasingly reduced to data points. In turn, this data has become ever more difficult to analyze without vast computing power, leading to a dependency on the old colonial powers to refine the data of the poor, before selling it back to them.

A searing critique of the “freedom” that America offers to the victims of its imperialist machinations of war and occupation
 

Meaningless Citizenship traces the costs of America’s long-term military involvement around the world by following the forced displacement of Iraqi families, unveiling how Iraqis are doubly displaced: first by the machinery of American imperialism in their native countries and then through a more pernicious war occurring on U.S. soil—the dismantling of the welfare state.

Revealing the everyday struggles and barriers that texture the lives of Iraqi families recently resettled to the United States, Sally Wesley Bonet draws from four years of deep involvement in the refugee community of Philadelphia. An education scholar, Bonet’s analysis moves beyond the prevalent tendency to collapse schooling into education. Focusing beyond the public school to other critical institutions, such as public assistance, resettlement programs, and healthcare, she shows how encounters with institutions of the state are an inherently educative process for both refugee youths and adults, teaching about the types of citizenship they are expected to enact and embody while simultaneously shaping them into laboring subjects in service of capitalism. 

An intimate, in-depth ethnography, Meaningless Citizenship exposes how the veneer of American values—freedom, democracy, human rights—exported to countries like Iraq, disintegrates to uncover what is really beneath: a nation-state that prioritizes the needs of capitalism above the survival and wellbeing of its citizens.

For most migrants, developing communication strategies in host countries is vital for finding social connections, navigating the pressures of assimilation, and maintaining links to their original cultures. Migrant World Making explores this process of constructing a homeplace by creating a network of communication tools and strategies to connect with multiple communities. Since what it means to be a migrant differs from person to person, the contributors to this edited collection showcase numerous practices migrants adopt to communicate and connect with others as they forge their own identities in globalized yet highly nationalistic societies. With varying aspirations and motives for seeking new homes, migrants build communities by telling stories, engaging in social media activism, protesting, writing scholarly criticism, and using many other modes of communication. To match this variety, the transnational scholars represented here use a wide array of rhetorical, cultural, and communication methodologies and epistemologies to describe what the experience of migration means to those who have lived it.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary framing of migration and law, drawing from sociology, politics, philosophy, and history.

Borders not only demarcate nations and territories but also transform people into migrants. Together with law and law enforcement, borders create residents and foreigners. The law ascertains who crosses borders and who does not, and determines who remains foreign despite being within national borders. Migrating Borders and Citizenship in Law argues that law has multiple roles and mechanisms for breathing life into borders, operating at different locales and scales (from worldwide to the nation, and from the family to the workplace), and through different practices, including preventing entry and withholding access to resources.

This book examines case law, legislation, and press accounts relating to several key events in recent times that have changed the legal landscape on migration control, such as the Immigration and Nationality Acts in the United Kingdom, the end of the empire, the arrival of Empire Windrush, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the case of Shamima Begum. Focusing on race and ethnicity, gender, and class, as well as crime and control, Migrating Borders and Citizenship in Law contextualizes the legal debates around these historical and political developments, the question of who belongs, the consequences of behavior for immigration status and citizenship, and the links with conduct and national security.
 

As a five-year-old boy, Pao Lor joined thousands of Hmong who fled for their lives through the jungles of Laos in the aftermath of war. After a difficult and perilous journey that neither of his parents survived, he reached the safety of Thailand, but the young refugee boy’s challenges were only just beginning.

Born in a small farming village, Pao was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. But the course of his life changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the Hmong faced persecution for their role in helping US forces fighting communism in the region. After more than two years in Thai refugee camps, Pao and his surviving family members boarded the belly of an “iron eagle” bound for the United States, where he pictured a new life of comfort and happiness. Instead, Pao found himself navigating a frightening and unfamiliar world, adjusting to a string of new schools and living situations while struggling to fulfill the hopes his parents had once held for his future. Now in Modern Jungles, Pao Lor shares his inspiring coming-of-age tale about perseverance, grit, and hope. 

Included are discussion questions for use by book clubs, in classrooms, or around the dinner table.