Join us for the first event in our 2026-27 Speaker Series, featuring Dr. Rawan Arar, who will present her talk, “Humanitarian Fictions: Narrative, Power, and the Politics of Refugee Reception.”
This event will be held in a hybrid format.
Lunch will be served at 11:45 AM in Dodson Room. The lecture will start at 12:15 PM and wrap up at 1:45 PM.
Abstract
Scholars and practitioners use a shared vocabulary to describe displacement and refugee reception. Terms such as “refugee,” “migrant,” “host community,” “humanitarianism,” “resilience,” and “refugee burden” allow different actors to communicate and coordinate. At the same time, this language can obscure lived experiences and simplify complex social and political realities. By making displacement easier to describe and humanitarian action easier to organize, it can also make relations of power and inequality less visible.
Dr. Arar introduces the concept of humanitarian fiction to examine how these simplified representations come to be treated as neutral accounts of reality. Drawing on her research with Syrian refugees in Jordan, this talk examines how humanitarian fictions are produced and sustained and how they shape refugees’ everyday experiences. She explores the tensions between humanitarian representations and lived realities and asks how scholars can engage these categories critically without reproducing the limitations they contain.
About Dr. Rawan Arar
Rawan Arar is an Assistant 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.
