Refuge and Resistance: A Conversation with Anne Irfan

Date and Time

November 8, 2023

11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Location

Event Recording

Join us for a conversation between the Palestine Program‘s inaugural fellow, Dr. Sawsan Abdulrahim, and Dr. Anne Irfan to discuss her recent book Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System. The book traces the history and politics of the specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency, that was established to provide quasi-state services to Palestinian refugees including education and healthcare. Dr. Irfan shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue.

This webinar is co-sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School and is part of a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which will be celebrated on December 10, 2023.

Date and Time: Wednesday, November 8 at 11:00am – 12:00pm EST | 6:00pm – 7:00pm EET

Location: Zoom – registration required

Moderator:

Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH

Dr. Sawsan Abdulrahim is a Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut where she teaches courses on health promotion theory, social epidemiology, and forced migration. Her work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region. Her substantive research areas include migration and health; the syndemic of early marriage and mental distress in forced displacement; and aging and the wellbeing of women migrant care workers.

Speaker:

Anne Irfan, PhD

Dr. Anne Irfan is Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London (UCL). She is the author of Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System, published earlier this year with Columbia University Press, and has written several award-winning articles for the Journal of Refugee Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies and Jerusalem Quarterly, among others. In addition to her academic work, Dr Irfan has addressed the UN and the UK Parliament on Middle Eastern displacement, as well as contributing to The Washington Post, The Nation and Al Jazeera.