Event: WEDS TALKS: Refugee Storytelling and Material Culture as Knowledge Production in Digital Humanities

ABSTRACT: Politics are heavily ingrained in dominant understandings of refugeehood through the political categorization of refugees, selective admittance to countries of asylum, and dehumanizing statistics reported by governments receiving these individuals. In recent years, communities have begun work to shift understandings of refugeehood and its dominant narrative to one spread by the individual, centering voices of refugees in works of storytelling, preservation of heritage, and the sharing of material culture. This talk will discuss the work being done by the Refugee Material Culture Initiative to shift understandings of refugeehood from those spread by policy, statistics, and governing peoples to understandings built on the personal narratives told by individuals who have experienced refugeehood. The talk will discuss how the centering refugee voices and the act of storytelling works to establish refugees as knowledge-producers in their own histories, applying frameworks including feminist epistemology, memory-work, and postcolonial theory discussed across Critical Refugee Studies, as well as digital archaeology techniques, to preserve, share, and make accessible the various individual stories of Vietnamese Refugees. The talk will showcase the exploration and sharing of material culture donated by Vietnamese Refugees and their families to the Vietnamese Heritage Museum in Westminster County’s Little Saigon, and the role this digitization plays in processes of storytelling, knowledge production, and re-centering of refugees in their own history.

BIO: Charley Walsh is an undergraduate junior in the College of Arts and Sciences at UCLA, pursuing a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Classical Civilizations.

Connor Lim is a senior undergraduate in the Samueli College of Engineering studying Mechanical Engineering; his specialties lie in optical engineering and imaging technologies.