Prior to her Speaker Series lecture, join Dr. Rawan Arar for an informal coffee chat exploring the theme Mapping (Im)mobility.
Dr. Arar’s research has engaged extensively with scholarly critiques of the refugee-migrant binary. With David FitzGerald, she developed a conceptual tool to analyze complex experiences of mobility and the limits of existing categories. In The Refugee System, they introduce the “(im)mobility chessboard,” a matrix that brings together dimensions of movement and coercion. They have since continued to refine and apply the chessboard, including by mapping the experience of a Syrian family onto the matrix, as illustrated in the ASA Footnotes article, “Mapping (Im)mobility: How a Syrian Family Faced Coercion and Movement,” which participants are encouraged to read before the session.
During the coffee chat, Dr. Arar will briefly introduce the chessboard, discuss how it brings together insights from different fields of study, and reflect on how it has evolved and been applied across various contexts. She hopes to use the session as an opportunity for collective reflection on the chessboard as an analytical tool: What questions does it raise? How might it be adapted for other research projects?
About Dr. Rawan Arar
Rawan Arar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California San Diego and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Her scholarship on refugees, migration, and the politics of displacement has appeared in Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Middle East Law and Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Contexts, and Journal of Refugee Studies, among others. She is the co-author, with David Scott FitzGerald, of The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach and co-editor of Refugee Resettlement as an Institution.
