A Shot of Whiskey
Afghanistan to Greece – fleeing the Taliban and unsafe conditions, a family embarks on a journey to reach Germany. Along
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Smuggling
The Story of Precious
A nearly blind mother of three leaves Cameroon to travel alone through South and Mesoamerica in hopes of reaching the
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The Other Migration, Part 3: Financial Journey of Refugees
Money can reveal new and important aspects of the migration journey. In part three of this three-part series, learn what finances can tell us as migrants and refugees save, spend, and try to maintain money traveling from around the world, to South America, and up through Central America in a perilous migration route.
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Financial Journey of Refugees in the Mediterranean
What can money reveal about the experience of migration? This video, created by Charlie Bentley, highlights the groundbreaking research of Kim Wilson and Roxani Krystalli, using finance as a lens to understand migration journeys throughout the Mediterranean.
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The Ties that Bind (or Not): Social Networks Among Extra-Continental Migrants
By Heather Kunin, under the supervision of Kim Wilson. Social networks have long been recognized as playing a pivotal role within migration, with multiple studies examining, among other phenomena, the role of social networks in predicting the decision to migrate and choice of destination, as well as in impacting migrants’ chances for integration. Social network analysis (SNA) is a methodology for visualizing and interrogating relationships among actors and is highly applicable to a field where social networks are considered “one of the fundamentals of the migration process.” Until recently, this discipline has been woefully underutilized within migration studies, although this is beginning to change.
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Tracing the Financial Journeys of Nepali Migrants
By Subin Mulmi, under the supervision of Kim Wilson. The 2015 earthquake in Nepal resulted in the deaths of 8,970 people with 22,302 injured. Several reports have estimated that more than one million houses were destroyed, affecting the lives of six million people. Only a handful of families have been relocated to safer places. Even before the quake, the country was reeling from the effects of the decade-long civil war that claimed the lives of 13,236 people and led to the disappearance of thousands more. In June 2009, the Nepal IDP Working Group reported that up to 70,000 people displaced by the conflict had not yet found durable housing. They remained unable to return home, integrate locally, or resettle elsewhere.
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What Can Hotels Teach Us about Smuggling?
By Maria Teresa Nagel, under the supervision of Kim Wilson. There is limited research describing the smuggling industry and its actors, particularly in Central America. Our study hopes to address this knowledge gap by disclosing how human smugglers lodge their clients and the role hotels play in the smuggling ecosystem.
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Origins Breed Commonalities, Camaraderie, and Conflict
By Aastha Dua and Subin Mulmi, under the supervision of Kim Wilson. The authors observed the South Asian identity play out in interesting and diverse ways among the migrants interviewed. The dynamic between the general populations of these countries—oscillating between brotherly love, jealousy, and rivalry—was reflected in full, as if in a microcosm, among the South Asian migrants traveling to America in their interactions with each other. This essay is an attempt to describe this dynamic, culled from the interviews that were conducted by the authors with the migrants and from their own observations in the CATEMs (Temporary Care Centers for Migrants) and the surrounding areas in Costa Rica.
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‘I followed the flood’: A Gender Analysis of the Moral and Financial Economies of Forced Migration
An article by Roxanne Krystalli, Allyson Hawkins, and Kim Wilson, published in “Disasters.” What would a gender analysis of refugee crises reveal if one expanded the focus beyond female refugees, and acts of physical violence? This paper draws on qualitative research conducted in Denmark, Greece, Jordan, and Turkey in July and August 2016 to spotlight the gendered kinship, hierarchies, networks, and transactions that affect refugees. The coping strategies of groups often overlooked in the gender conversation are examined throughout this study, including those of male refugees and those making crossings outside of the context of a family unit. The analysis is theoretically situated at the intersection of critical humanitarianism and the politics of vulnerability, and rooted in debates about the feminisation of refugees and corresponding protection agendas. A key contribution of this work is the ethnographic tracing of how refugees embody these politics along their journeys.
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