"I know that my only chance now is to be reclassified"

November 12, 2021 4:16 PM

"The Stateless Person's Tale" & "The Arriver's Tale," as told to Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (previously). "Delia's Return: The Migration and Deportation of an Unaccompanied Child" by Lauren Heidbrink, Delia, and Gabriela Afable (American Anthropologist, 06/2021; Spanish; study guide; podcast; transcript). 27 more tales. More anthropologists on deportee experiences in Haiti, Mexico, and Ghana. Anth. of transnationalism syllabus archive. Mary Ruth Wossum-Fisher (MA thesis, 08/2021), "Cultural Anthropologists' Reflections on Expert Witnessing for Asylum Cases" [PDF]. Anne McCready Heinen (Texas Monthly, 01/2021), "Finding the Lost": "They didn't discover Christian's fate until six years later ... His story might have ended there if not for forensic anthropology professor Kate Spradley."
posted by Wobbuffet (3 comments total)

I read the first link and it was so incredibly sad. The betrayal!!
posted by brainwane at 4:00 AM on November 13, 2021

Wow - incredible collection of links, thank you Wobbuffet! I look forward to digging in.
posted by esoteric things at 5:42 AM on November 13, 2021

It's just so cruel, and I can't truly believe that it's what most average people want when they are informed of the facts, and yet it's so hard to stop. When the Windrush scandal broke, for instance, I naively thought that things would get fixed, because it was so obviously stupid and cruel. We have set up this system where in order to, eg, protect one person from being sent back to a country that is at best totally unknown to them and at worst a death sentence, we have either to organize a whole huge campaign to change a raft of laws (and that has not been successful) or we have to have massive protests every time for each person (and that doesn't always work). The whole regime of law in this area is so stupid and bad and unfair and an absolute failure.
posted by Frowner at 7:40 AM on November 13, 2021 [2 favorites]