Habitats Archives - Page 8 of 16

Migration

Can Refugee Scholars Hold the Line?

Why the theoretical line that separates forced migrants from other persons on the move may not be sustainable

June 21, 2021 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

_____ My title doesn’t refer to whether refugee scholars should help others fend off attacks from governments and populist parties that are intent on destroying the international protection regimes we study. Most of us are already so engaged. Rather, I am asking a conceptual question about the nature of refugee scholarship: does ...

Migration

Breaking the ‘Otherness’ Fixation

Diversity is held at the pinnacle of progressive thought, but full inclusion is far from becoming a reality

May 25, 2021 • by Halleh Ghorashi

_____ I arrived in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker in 1988. In Iran, I had been active in a revolution that later became an Islamic revolution. I felt connected to leftist movements all over the world, and the idea of international solidarity gave me strength and hope for the future. With ...

History

The Floating Pool Lady

A quest to bring a public pool to New York City’s waterfront

May 12, 2021 • by Ann L. Buttenwieser

_____ My research in the musty documents detailing the administrative history of New York Harbor ended roughly with the demise of the floating public baths. These documents, which no one had seen or cared about for nearly a century, were about to be thrown out. I left the Battery Maritime Building, ...

New York City

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

The limits of monuments in public remembrance

April 27, 2021 • by Silvana Alvarez Basto

The tensions between public monuments and history frequently orbit the question of “historical faithfulness” or “accuracy.” The controversy surrounding the new women’s rights monument in Central Park is an example of these tensions. Sculpted by Meredith Bergmann, the monument represents suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth. ...

The New Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in New York

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

A conversation between Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Dwayne Betts

April 22, 2021 • by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Marci Shore

Marci: As you know, the original impetus for this forum was horror of the children being taken away from their parents at the American border, and my saying to Stephen Naron that we should use material from the Fortunoff archive to prepare a film about parent-child separation during the Holocaust. ...

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

Columnists

Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

Claims that children are being harmed are a thin cover for returning to a world where white people don’t have to feel bad about racism

April 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

Late last week, Paul Rossi, a member of the mathematics faculty at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan, denounced the social justice and anti-racism program instituted by the school in 2020. Before writing this essay, published on Bari Weiss’s contrarian Substack, Common Sense, Rossi was already in hot water. By ...

Why the Howling That New York’s Private Schools Have Been Taken Over By Critical Race Theory?

Activism

The True Story of Two Guatemalan Asylum Seekers at Our Border

A saga of dispossession, past and present

April 15, 2021 • by Mónica Salmón Gómez

_____I met Francisco Chávez and Gaspar Cobo through a colleague and advocate for migrants’ and refugees’ human rights who works in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The two of them had fled Guatemala in June 2019. Travelling with a larger group of Central Americans going north, it took them twenty days to ...

The True Story of Two Guatemalan Asylum Seekers at Our Border

Art & Design

Broom Swept

Failure tells a tale about capitalism too

March 2, 2021 • by Mark Hage

_____ What closes and then darkness, what opens and then bright?Before the horn has risen,where hides the lord of light? —Tian Wen, A Chinese Book of Origins How you frame something is a moral decision. —Babette Mangolte On Mercer Street, on the island of Manhattan, and just before the city paused, walking in a southerly direction ...

Migration

We’ve Never Been Global

How local meanings mattered in 1900 and still matter now

February 2, 2021 • by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The last sun of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the ...

Migration

“I will tell you the story of belatedness”

Why for us, migrants, it is always too late

January 14, 2021 • by Valeria Castelli, Giulia Sbaffi and Dagmawi Yimer

“I will tell you the story of belatedness. We migrants, we refugees, we foreigners.We are always seen as delayed people.We arrive [at] the right time.And it is always too late.”Shahram Khosravi It is mid-June when we video chat with Dagmawi Yimer, an Ethiopian refugee and filmmaker living in Italy, for the first ...

Capitalism

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

December 10, 2020 • by Jeannette Estruth

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

Migration

Migration as a Claim for Reparations

The connections between political agency and migration

December 7, 2020 • by Lea Coffineau

In October 2016, Hussein and I met over coffee at a Tunisian pastry shop in the north of Paris to follow up on his administrative battle with the French government. We had spent months filing paperwork together, building the strongest possible case for his asylum application. Hussein had fled Sudan ...