American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in Residence lecture

The Institute for the Humanities presents the American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in Residence lecture with Suhaila Meera, who will talk about how children perform displacement.

There are currently 123.2 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and nearly half of them are under age 18. As displacement accelerates, mainstream media’s focus on children has intensified debates about innocence, deservingness and citizenship. Artists, too, have turned toward the figure of the child on the move. But how and why have children become main characters in the grand drama of contemporary displacement? Recent cinematic and theatrical representations of refugee children from the Middle East and South Asia reveal an adoptive gaze, in which children elicit sympathy insofar as they appear adoptable, whether into a nuclear family or the nation-state. While directors mobilize children as symbols of what borders are or could become, child actors — many of them refugees — do not simply inhabit these roles, but strategically negotiate them.

Meera is a director, dramaturg and assistant professor of theater at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is working on her first book project, a cultural analysis of how and why children became main characters in the grand drama of contemporary displacement, with a focus on South Asia and the Middle East. Her writing has appeared in Performance Research, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, Women’s Studies, Theatre Journal and Theatre Topics. She recently adapted and directed “Pali,” a play by Bhisham Sahni, at Stanford University and was the dramaturg for Yilong Liu’s “PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute” at the New Conservatory Theatre Center.

Contact huminst@uic.edu for accessibility requests.