Work in Displacement Studies lies at the intersection of numerous interdisciplinary fields, such as migration studies, refugee studies, border studies, Indigenous studies, Africana studies, Food Studies, coastal studies, human rights, urban studies, data studies and Latinx studies. Building on that body of literature and the NEH/SSRC working group on “Converging Displacements” at Virginia Tech, this reader takes a critical approach to displacement studies. Critical displacement studies is a methodology examining disruptions of displacement where community access and contribution is essential. An increasingly common experience, being uprooted from place occurs across a range of geographic and temporal scales. This reader reflects critically on these experiences. As more than 100 million individuals have been forcibly displaced, attention to power, culture, narratives, convergences, hybridities, and temporalities are important to imagining just approaches to forced relocation.

The proposed reader brings together a breadth of perspectives across disciplines and a variety of forms, building a Critical Displacement Studies approach. This interdisciplinary approach examines discourses across genres (literature, media, historical documents, and law), contexts (civil unrest, genocide, migration, climate change, eminent domain, and natural disaster) and infrastructures (digital, institutional, epistemic, and political).

This reader seeks academic and non-academic essays, public-oriented pieces, interviews, poetry, and other artistic forms that draw from the richness of interdisciplinary approaches and varied experiences. Questions to be addressed could include, but are not limited to:

• ●  What are the diverse spatialities and temporalities of displacement?

• ●  How does a critical displacement studies framework disrupt normative discourses of borders,

  assimilation, and migration?

• ●  What aliveness arises in the encounters brought about by forced displacement?

• ●  How do people engage dance, creative writing, memoir, film or other art forms to express

  experiences of displacement?

• ●  How can these approaches open or foreclose alternative imaginaries about borders,

  identities, and places?

• ●  Using your research, what distinguishes Critical Displacement Studies from related and

  intersecting studies?

  Submit abstracts and inquiries to Molly Todd at CRMDS@VT.edu by January 1st, 2023. The deadline for manuscripts will be May 30th, 2023. This reader will be open-access and include a corresponding website.