Call for Papers:

Cluster on Refusal in Migrant and Refugee Lifemaking

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

Convener: Monisha Das Gupta
Submission length: 6,000-8,000 words, including the list of references

Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2026
 
This call aims to bring together scholars across disciplines and interdisciplines to tackle the stance of refusal on the part of refugees and migrants to speak the language of the state and international bodies that govern their movement and provide aid. We invite scholars to approach everyday, legal, and epistemic refusal through life writing by and for those on the move, those who are confined, and those who insist on living in places rendered disposable.

We define life writing capaciously. Following life writing scholars, we ask contributors to examine non-fiction first-person or biographical creative expression, including ephemera, and to dwell on silences, in addition to conventional genres such as memoirs, letters, testimonies, and oral or life histories. We ask contributors to turn readers’ attention to the ways in which migrants tell their own stories, name their experience, and choose their form and audience. Biographical approaches to institutions and corporations are welcome.

We encourage authors to reflect on their published work on refusal in the context of state-sanctioned mobility, immobility, or displacement, or submit new work. The provocation to think about how migrant or refugee researchers are themselves transformed when working and writing about migrants or displaced people can be a generative line of inquiry.
The cluster considers the slipperiness of the designations—migrants, immigrants, and refugees. It troubles the boundaries between forced and voluntary migration. And, it makes space for what scholars call "internal migration." How have people documented or narrated their movement within spaces bounded by modern nation-state borders as they navigated structural violence? What about those who have collectively refused to flee life-threatening circumstances? Those who have survived genocide in Gaza, for example, refuse their displacement and dispossession. Across Oceania, Indigenous people refuse their designation as climate refugees as sea levels rise, insisting that the land, freshwater, and ocean feed their identity and the survival of future generations.
 
Please send your abstracts (250 words) to dasgupta@hawaii.edu by July 1, 2026. Authors will be notified whether their abstracts have been selected for the cluster by July 15, 2026.

Full articles (6000-8000 words) are due by October 15, 2026.