Transnational People in a Nation-State World: Perspectives on Displacement | A Keynote Lecture by Dr. Rochelle Davis

This lecture was the keynote lecture of the inaugural CCMS Summer Institute on Transnational Anthropological Histories.

On Saturday, May 16, CCMS hosted a keynote lecture by Rochelle Davis.

Humans once moved with freedom. Then we created nation-states with passports and visas. So today, while economic capital and communication travel globally, most humans cannot. These physical borders that restrict our movements ignore how we are transnational in our belongings, identifications, languages, work, passions, and politics.

About the Speaker

Dr. Rochelle Davis’ research is on refugees, war, and conflict, particularly Syrian and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons. Since 2010, her research projects have included training refugees and local community members to develop questions and conduct interviews. To date, these projects have amassed over 300 in-depth interviews with refugees and migrants in the region. (see publications below)

She also is also a Senior Researcher on a joint project between Georgetown University and the International Organization for Migration grant conducting a mixed-methods panel survey of over 3000 Iraqi households displaced since 2014 by ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh. https://ccas.georgetown.edu/resources/iom-gu-iraq-idp-study/ and see also http://iraqrecovery.org/durablesolutions/

Her first book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced, (Stanford University Press, 2012) was co-winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award recognizing outstanding publications in Middle East studies. The book addresses how Palestinian refugees today write histories of their villages that were destroyed in the 1948 war, and the stories and commemorations of village life that are circulated in the diaspora.

Professor Davis is currently writing a book on the role of culture in the U.S. military wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on research she has conducted since 2006. Using interviews with US military servicemembers and Iraqis, as well as governmental and military policy and strategy documents, cultural training material, journalists’ reporting, and soldier memoirs, she focuses on the narratives about Iraqis, Afghans, Arabs, and Muslims. Her analysis explicates the conundrums of being being tasked to be culturally sensitive in a military occupation, and the personal and collective experiences of war.

ADMINISTRATION: Professor Davis is also the PrincipaI Investigator on a US Department of Education Title VI grant (2018-2022) for Georgetown’s National Resource Center-Middle East/North Africa. This grant funds less-commonly taught languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Swahili, and Turkish) as well as public outreach programs, summer teacher institutes, and K-12 outreach in the community (See https://ccas.georgetown.edu/outreach).

TEACHING: Professor Davis’ teaching interests include Arab society and culture; cultural heritage and conflict; refugees, migrants and immigrants in and out of the Arab World; and war and conflict. She uses different genres of texts and other forms of media in her classroom to expose students to the wide range of material – both primary and secondary – about the Arab World. Her syllabi include ethnographies, autobiographies, scholarly books and articles from different disciplines, blogs, cartoons, films, novels, poetry, and media. Classroom work has included being part of the Wikimedia Foundation Public Policy Project, curating poster exhibits using the Palestine Poster Project Archive, and writing and publishing editorials. She also works closely with student research assistants and has co-published a number of articles with them.

About the Moderator

Dr. Darren Byler is a sociocultural anthropologist whose teaching and research examines the effects of surveillance on stateless populations and the role of infrastructural state power in contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.

His monograph, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City  (Duke University Press, 2022), examines emerging forms of media, infrastructure, economics and politics in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia (Ch: Xinjiang). The book, which is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among Uyghur and Han internal male migrants, argues that Chinese authorities and technologists have made Uyghurs the object of what it names “terror capitalism.” It shows that this emergent form of internal colonialism and capitalist frontier-making utilizes a post-9/11 discourse of terrorism, what he shows produces a novel sequence of racialization, to justify state investment in a wide array of policing and social engineering systems. These techno-political systems have “disappeared” hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in “reeducation” camps and other forms of productive detention while empowering millions of state workers and private contractors who build the system. The book considers how the ubiquity of pass-book systems, webs of technological surveillance, urban banishment and mass internment camps have reshaped human experience among native Uyghurs and Han settler-colonizers in the capital of the region Ürümchi. Ultimately, the book presents an analysis of resistance to terror capitalism, what he terms a “minor politics of refusal,” that emerges from the way Uyghurs and Han allies use new media and embodied practices of care taking to oppose this colonial formation. The book was awarded the 2023 Gregory Bateson Award from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the 2023 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropology Association.

His current research follows up on the argument of his first book to consider how contemporary capitalism and colonialism travels through digital infrastructural systems from China to Malaysia. This multi-sited project, supported by funding from Columbia University's Global Reports series and a Luce Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship involves field research and in-depth interviews with technology workers, former detainees and other stateless Muslim populations affected by the infrastructural power of digital surveillance along China’s New Silk Road. 

As part of this project, he published a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony  (Columbia Global Reports 2021). Drawing on fieldwork with stateless populations in Kazakhstan and internal Chinese police files, this book examines effects of the AI-assisted mass surveillance and internment system that has been implemented in China’s internal colony Xinjiang. He has also co-edited a volume called Xinjiang Year Zero (Australia National University Press 2021). This open-access book is written as an undergraduate textbook, featuring chapters from over a dozen authors. It offers students and educators a resource to understand the origins and modalities of the internment camp system in Northwest China not only from a human rights and international law perspective, but also as directly related to global history and the global economy.

He is currently completing an academic monograph that synthesizes and expands on some of the claims made in these previous publications titled Thinking with Violence: Narratives of Thought Reform & Infrastructural State Power in Northwest China. This archive driven project presents a genealogy of policing, carceral and legal systems, and education in Northwest China. It seeks to understand the way Chinese authorities built the capacity to enact an atrocity crime. He is also developing an additional project to look at the effects of Chinese-built “safe city” systems in Malaysia.