Refugee Memories and Documentation

Refugees are often represented as victims of fear, persecution, and violence. When refugees are consistently represented solely as victims without further depth or context, refugees become viewable as objects of romanticized narratives. This results in the erasure of refugees’ individualities, lived experiences, and multidimensionality as people, as well as the disacknowledgement of communities in which refugees uplift each other and coexist.

In this exhibit, we aim to address these issues through an exploration of artifacts from both Greco-Roman classical antiquity and the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora, and hope to expand current incomplete understandings of refugeehood. We will look at these artifacts through the lens of Feminist Refugee Epistemology (FRE), defined by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective as

“a kind of looking practice that interrogates the less visible and more quotidian details of refugee lives” while acknowledging “the hidden and overt injuries that refugees experience.”

FRE seeks to understand refugeehood in a broader context and highlights the joy in the everyday lives of refugees.