Join us for this year's Sally Weaver Award presentation and guest lecture!
Guest speaker, Elif Sari, Ph.D. in Anthropology (Cornell 2021) with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies will be presenting a lecture titled:
Uncertain Waiting, Uncertain Methodologies: Anthropology of Asylum and Borders
The prospect for Middle Eastern LGBTQ refugee resettlement has grown increasingly dim since 2015, as the United States and Canada have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies. Today, many LGBTQ applicants, stuck in transit countries in the Global South for years, are increasingly reaching out to Canadian queer NGOs and church groups to seek private sponsorship as one of the last few available resettlement paths.
Drawing on her ethnographic research and community collaborations with Iranian LGBTQ refugees in Turkey awaiting resettlement to North America, Sari’s talk will discuss the contemporary trends in queer asylum, including global border closures, lengthening waiting times for refugees, and an increasing shift from public to private-sponsored refugee resettlement. It will also ask: How do anthropological engagements with refugees under circumstances of uncertain waiting, forced immobility, and human rights violations raise ethical, political, and methodological questions for the discipline of anthropology? How do questions of accountability, transparency, and commitment inform the methodological and ethical orientations of anthropological research on asylum and borders? And how can anthropologists create alternative methods of research and collaboration in restrictive and exploitative conditions?
Biography
Elif Sari holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (Cornell 2021) with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and is theMartha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Elif’s scholarship lies at the intersections of transnational sexualities, migration, waiting, humanitarianism, and queer and critical race theory with a specific focus on the Middle East and its diasporas as well as collaborative, multimodal, and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with Iranian LGBTQ refugees in Turkey awaiting resettlement to the US and Canada, her dissertation, “Waiting in Transit: Iranian LGBTQ Refugees in Turkey and the Sexuality of (Im)Mobility,” explores how refugees cope with precarious and uncertain waiting while negotiating their racialized and sexualized positionings with multiple nation-states, international asylum authorities, diasporic NGOs, and local townspeople.
Elif’s current research focuses on private refugee sponsorship in Canada, exploring the effects of this new phenomenon on queer mobilities, race, belonging, and sexual citizenship in the current era of immigration retrenchment, growing xenophobia, and anti-Muslim racism. Since 2014, she works as a co-editor for the Turkey page at Jadaliyya, an independent e-zine that provides critical analysis and pedagogy related to the Middle East and North Africa. Elif will join the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia as an Assistant professor in Fall 2022.
Guest lecture is free to attend. Start time is 12:30pm.
This lecture is co-hosted by the Balsillie School of International Affair’s Migration, Mobilities, and Social Politics Research Cluster